->''"I was old when the molecules of your world joined and called themselves land and sea and fish and man.\\That's why they come back to Z'ha'dum every time they're driven off. Because I'm here. They think they are showing respect. They don't understand. They did use to. But that was a long time ago. A million years."''-->-- '''Lorien''', ''Series/BabylonFive''

There are the old, and then there are the truly old. People usually die within a century or so. Cities and nations may last a few millennia, and we think them old, but the truly old are so much older.

They were already old when all the nations we know were born, even those now [[TheTimeOfMyths vanished into history]]. They can speak of Ancient Athens and Babylon [[SeenItAll as casually as we might speak of yesterday]], for to them those ancient cities [[TimeDissonance are but recent memories]]. They were there when brick was first laid on brick, over five thousand years ago. They may have watched the trilobites come, and go, with eyes older than the stars. They may even be older than time itself.

Contemplating such immense spans of time is like looking into an abyss, an inducement to vertigo, for they are more than we can grasp. Oh, we can talk about them easily enough, just more big numbers, but [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale we can't intuit them]]. We all know what a second or a week feels like; a million years (or even ten thousand) is beyond all human experience. It is from this incomprehension that this trope draws its power, when done right, an evocation of incomprehensible age that appeals to our sense of wonder. Naturally, a Time Abyss must experience all the years they claim. It doesn't count if they [[TimeTravel skip over]] or [[HumanPopsicle sleep through them]].

While a Time Abyss is normally a person -- perhaps not technically human, but a person nonetheless -- [[TheConstant objects can also qualify]], everything from cities to coins. Imagine an [[BigDumbObject alien monolith]] that has been sitting on the moon for three billion years. Think about all it has seen; the slow dance of the continents, the long march of evolution, the sudden flowering of civilization. Think, and wonder.

Geographical features can't qualify, though. We expect the hills to be old as dirt. We do not expect people, [[RagnarokProofing or any of their works]], to be older than the hills.

Five million years or so is a decent estimate of the ''minimum'' age needed to qualify for this trope, excluding any hypothetic immortal caveman, but in ScienceFiction a Time Abyss will typically be far older than that. Geological time scales are usually involved. In modern-day works of a religious bent ([[LowestCosmicDenominator or not]]), Adam and Eve (or Cain) are likely candidates, as the first ever living sapient creatures.

[[OurGodsAreDifferent A god]] or major EldritchAbomination is often a time abyss, as are {{Precursors}} and Elves (depending on how [[OurElvesAreBetter much better the elves are]], many aren't old enough to follow this trope). These characters may decide that there's NothingLeftToDoButDie because WhoWantsToLiveForever. May even oscillate between LivingForeverIsAwesome and bored eternity.

Meta-trope of LivingRelic, where the being in question finds themselves the last survivor of their civilization, race, or even species long after their kind has become myth. Being a Time Abyss will often lead to a work's creator wanting to engage in some ExpositionOfImmortality to show just how much they remember.

See TimeSkip for when a long time has passed between two events.

----!!Examples:

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder:Multimedia]]* ''The 2000 Year Old Man'': as titled, he wouldn't be old enough to qualify, but he claims his oldest memories are of living as a caveman. And he says he met Moses.* Many Franchise/{{Transformers}} in all incarnations are millions of years old. Some ''individuals'' are older than the entire human species.** For an idea, in the ''Franchise/TransformersGeneration1'' cartoon, Optimus and Megatron had been battling each other for millions of years before arriving to Earth. There's also how Shockwave didn't change much during the four million years the Autobots and the Decepticons in the Ark were in stasis (well, except for being minus one hand).** The Thirteen are considered old even by the standards of their species, including [[Anime/TransformersCybertron Vector Prime]] and The Fallen. The first creations of Primus, they were old ''before'' the war that's been going for millions of years got started. They don't even have faction insignias, since they pre-date their formations by eons (their toys notwithstanding).*** In ''WesternAnimation/TransformersPrime'' the Thirteen are said to have battled Unicron in ancient times. [[spoiler:Unicron eventually became Earth by collecting debris as he drifted through space. In the canon novel ''Exodus'', which takes place a few million years ago at most, Alpha Trion, one of the Thirteen, speaks to Optimus. In case you haven't figured it out that means Trion is at least five billion or so years old.]]** Kup and Alpha Trion from ''Franchise/TransformersGeneration1''; Alpha Trion was around when the Quintessons were driven from Cybertron -- about twelve million years ago. Kup could be anywhere from just as old to maybe "only" ten million years old; he's certainly older than Optimus Prime, who is at least nine million years old. Alpha Trion, in other media, was retconned into being one of the Thirteen, although this [[ContinuitySnarl isn't easy to reconcile]].*** The Quintessons themselves, or at least the ones who were personally around before they lost Cybertron (e.g. the three-face who built the Transorganic energy-leech) also qualify.** ...And that's not counting all the [[DeathIsCheap resurrections]].** Starscream is ''so'' good at [[TheStarscream the trope he named]] that he betrayed '''''time'''''!-->'''Starscream:''' My [[MechanicalLifeforms exo-structure]] was destroyed, but miraculously my [[OurSoulsAreDifferent spark]] endured, [[AndIMustScream drifting helplessly]] thorough the depths of space, [[{{Immortality}} beyond the reach]] of time itself! -- ''WesternAnimation/BeastWars'', "Possession"** ''ComicBook/TransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye'' states that Transformers actually can die of old age... it just takes a little under a billion years for it to happen. In fact they're so long-lived that, for many years, Cybertronians believed themselves to be biologically immortal, expressly because they'd never actually seen someone die of old age.*** Another continuity (''Transformers Regeneration One'') has the Transformers aging much faster after their universe is cut-off from Primus, the multiversal being that created the Transformers and influences every universe they appear in.** In ''WesternAnimation/TransformersAnimated'', immense temporal units get thrown around casually, emphasizing just how long it is that they can live. For some examples, Ratchet, whose general demeanor is is middle aged, is millions of years old. Meanwhile, in a third season episode flashing back to Prowl's joining of Optimus Prime's team, Prowl claims to have spent a ''million years'' in meditation before they disturbed him, and shortly afterwards, Optimus casually refers to 50 or 60 years as being "no time at all" before they can all head back to Cybertron.** IDW Kup, mostly seen in ''ComicBook/TheTransformersRobotsInDisguise'', was already old when he was sent back in time to the beginning of the Dead Universe. Having taken TheSlowPath back to the present before returning to the normal universe none the worse for wear, he is almost definitely older than ''the universe itself''.* ComicBook/XMen villain Comicbook/{{Apocalypse}} was born in ancient Egypt and in various cartoons/comics boasts about things like how 20th/21st century superpowers/technology are no closer to besting him than Babylonian fire sticks were.-->"I am the rocks of the eternal shore; crash against me and be broken!"[[/folder]]

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]* [[spoiler:[[HumanoidAbomination Ronnie Schiatto]]]] from ''LightNovel/{{Baccano}}'' is implied to be this. Although he doesn't give an exact date, he does drop a mention that he's been around since ancient times.* The Millennium Earl from ''Manga/DGrayMan'' is implied to be thousands of years old. He fought an as of yet unnamed hero wielding the Heart of Innocence during the Great Flood. [[spoiler:He's the First of the Noah, and the only one who never reincarnated; moreover, while this made fans speculate that he was the biblical Noah, it's been recently implied that he's actually ''Adam''.]]* ''Franchise/{{Dragonball}}''** The Kais. The youngest-looking of them is over five million years old and has not aged visibly in that time. Old Kai is roughly seventy-five million years old, according to WordOfGod.** The wizard Babidi, considering his father was killed five million years ago. Unlike the Kais though, Babidi does look quite old.** ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'' states that Beerus was the one who sealed Old Kai in the sword 75 million years ago. [[spoiler:As mentor of successive gods of destruction]], Whis is probably a lot older than this.** Majin Buu, the BigBad of the Buu saga(and Babidi's DragonInChief/[[spoiler:[[TheStarscream killer]] ]]) came into being five million years ago. [[spoiler:Or rather, that's what people believe. Buu has actually existed since time immemorial. While Bibidi (Babidi's father) ''thought'' he had created Buu, he actually only summoned him.]]* [[spoiler:[[TheManBehindTheMan Gooyan]]]], the true BigBad in ''Anime/FutariWaPrettyCureSplashStar'', is old enough to remember the universe before the Big Bang. He states that the silence was peaceful and that the cacophony of life is abhorrent to him. His entire goal is [[OmnicidalManiac to remove all life from the universe]] and return to that nothingness.* ''Manga/{{Guyver}}'': Zoalords Archanfel and Waferdanos were born before the last Ice Age, making them at least three million years old. The aliens who created them had been tampering with life on Earth pretty much since it first appeared, a ''billion'' or so years ago.* The Pillar Men from ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure'' are an ancient race of vampiric superbeings, stated to have been around since before the dawn of mankind.* Ajimu Najimi of ''Manga/MedakaBox'' is orders of magnitude older '''than the universe'''. Apparently it was quite boring before the Big Bang.* [[spoiler:Garterbelt]] is one in ''Anime/PantyAndStockingWithGarterbelt'', being forced to relive all of Earth's history since the dinosaurs by God.* The Observer of Time in ''Anime/RahXephon: Pluralitas Concentio''. [[spoiler:Ayato becomes the Observer at the end of the movie.]]* It isn't clear how old [[UsefulNotes/ThePope Onashia]] is in ''Anime/{{Simoun}}'' (or how long she's [[TheHighQueen ruled Simulacrum]]), but [[TheWomanWearingTheQueenlyMask her]] [[BrokenBird personality]] [[WhoWantsToLiveForever definitely]] [[ICannotSelfTerminate qualifies]].* The Choushin from ''Anime/TenchiMuyo''. For an uncounted period of time they searched for a being greater than themselves. It's unknown how long they existed like that, assuming time even applies to that state, but they eventually created ''the entire multiverse of space and time'' and have been around ever since. And if that doesn't mean anything to you, then one of them created a physical body to exist in which she is still alive and kicking over twenty thousand years later.* In ''Anime/YuGiOhGX'', the Light of Ruin was a CosmicEntity that has literally been around for eons. * The [[spoiler:living ruins under the town]] in ''Manga/{{Uzumaki}}''. Older than sentient life, they exist to cause an EternalRecurrence of madness and destruction. The story is just one cycle of their purpose.* The Kiltgangs in ''Anime/CaptainEarth'' are so incredibly old that [[spoiler:Teppei]] notes how weird an ordinary day (and life) on Earth feels. Then there's also the problem that anyone the Designer's Children kiss will be confronted via a telepathic kiss with memories worth eons upon eons of aggressive space warrior lifestyle.* Dragons in ''Manga/MissKobayashisDragonMaid'' are mentioned to have lifespans on the magnitude of billions of years. [[/folder]]

[[folder:Comics]]* Mammoth Mogul from ''ComicBook/ArchieComicsSonicTheHedgehog'' is an immortal, and at ''least'' twelve thousand years old.* ''ComicBook/BlackestNight''** The Life Entity is the oldest being in existence. It triggered the birth of life in the first place. Nekron, the cosmic void's response to life, is the second oldest being in existence.** The being known as Relic is even older than the Life Entity, since he is the only remaining member of the [=LightSmiths=], who were the first discoverers and users of the emotional spectrum, doing things even the Guardians couldn't even imagine. Relic is from the previous universe before the current DC universe the Life Entity created.* Franchise/TheDCU: The Guardians of The Universe, source of Franchise/GreenLantern's power. They were among the first sentient races to evolve, and are several billion years old - as individuals, that is, not just as a species. Additionally the other races that share ancestry with the Guardians, like the Zamorrans and the Controllers. Enemies of the Guardians, such as Larfleeze, Atrocitus, and the older Manhunters, also have ages in the billions. The Emotional Spectrum entities, born from the emotions of sentient life, are similarly old. Each one is stated to be the ''first living thing ever'' to experience the emotion of which they are an embodiment.* Comicbook/DoctorStrange foe [[EldritchAbomination Shuma Gorath]] and the other Many-Angled Ones were some of the first creatures to ever exist in the multiverse.* ''ComicBook/ElfQuest'' has quite a few long-lived characters which have been around since the humans were still in their stone age (with later stories taking place in a medievalish period), but ignoring those that got there by skipping millennia still leaves some examples: Two-Edge must be pushing twenty thousand years, was a legend in two troll kingdoms that have since crumbled, and had more or less secretly significant influence on the technological advancement of humankind. His mother, [[spoiler:Winnowill]] saw her tribe of elves go from wild forest dwellers to civilised, was cut off from them and watched/played with humans for some ten thousand years. She was venerated as a goddess by two entirely separate human peoples. Timmain spent most of her time as a wolf, but probably still counts. [[spoiler:When the immortal shapeshifting aliens that were the ancestors of elves were stranded on the World of Two Moons, she had lived through their space flight, which was long enough for the marmot and butterfly like animals they brought along to evolve into sentient humanoids. Before that, she was the last of her kind who remembered that they used to breed - which the immortals had given up due to overpopulation of their planet.]]* In ''Comicbook/{{Fables}}'', Frau Totenkinder was originally a tribal shaman in the Paleolithic era.* ''ComicBook/GreatLakesAvengers'': All indications are that Mr. Immortal is destined to be Galactus's equivalent in the next universe. His power is being completely incapable of dying (or rather, of ''staying dead''). Not even the most powerful of omnipotent beings could [[KilledOffForReal kill him off for real]], meaning that he ''will'' be this trope, whether he likes it or not. And ''he's a JokeCharacter''.* ''Comicbook/{{Lucifer}}''** [[EldritchAbomination The Jin En Mok]] predate the creation of the universe and want to escape it.** Also [[EldritchAbomination The Silk Man]], another survivor of a previous Creation, possibly the same one as the Jin En Mok, possibly not.** Lucifer ruled hell for 10 billion years - which means every single angel and lilim is older than this.* The Franchise/MarvelUniverse is full of this. ComicBook/{{Galactus}} is the sole survivor of the universe existing before the Big Bang. Each member of the Elders of the Universe is the last survivor of a forgotten race from billions of years ago who fanatically pursues a personal obsession such as collecting, gaming or fighting. The Proemials were born as the Universe was created, the Elder Gods emerged before life first appeared on Earth, the Eternals are a million years old (created by the even more ancient Celestials), the various Gods are thousands to tens of thousands of years old, the Neanderthal Cole witnessed the sinking of Lemuria twenty thousand years ago, the mutant Selene is seventeen thousand years old, and Black Axe is almost fifteen thousand.* Perhaps the most extreme non-cosmic example of the Marvel Universe is [[ComicBook/{{NewXMen}} John Sublime.]] He is a sentient bacteria who lives on Earth since the ''beginning of life'' on the planet, making him over 3 '''billion''' years old.* The ComicBook/NewGods of the Fourth World and their predecessors, the Old Gods, who predate the DC universe.* [[spoiler:Walker]] from ''ComicBook/{{Powers}}''. He's at least old enough to have been part of a clan of missing links, and his DNA has continued to mutate and evolve over time so that he fits right in today. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps unfortunately, [[TheFogOfAges his memory only goes back a very limited time]], maybe about a hundred years. Things towards the beginning of that span start fading and getting blurry, and eventually are replaced with new memories. Occasionally a catalyst can give him flashes of some long dormant memories, though.* The world of ''Comicbook/TheSandman'' is implied to have a handful of inhabitants that inspire one of the quotes on the quotations page. For the most part, we are [[CrypticBackgroundReference just assured that they're out there]], somewhere. We do meet one or two of them, though.** The Endless, Lucifer, and any other angel are said to be ten billion years old, the figure Creator/NeilGaiman used as the age of the universe. Though information revealed later in the comic seems to contradict this somewhat: only Destiny is anywhere near the age of the universe, whereas the rest of them only came into existence when lifeforms complex enough to experience the concept they embody first evolved (then again, lifeforms that qualify include [[GeniusLoci stars]] and {{eldritch abomination}}s, pushing things much earlier than might be expected). The angels and other mythical beings exist in a strange Schroedinger-esque state of being as old as time itself and [[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve having only existed for as long as humans believed in them]] -- or put another way, they were already ancient when they came into existence.** Thessaly, a human being (as opposed to cosmic spiritual entity) and powerful witch, sounds Neolithic when she describes her age in ''A Game of You''.** ''Brief Lives'' starts one chapter with a rough count of the number of humans and human-like beings on Earth who remember mammoths, Atlantis (the first one), dinosaurs, and were around before the Earth formed. Then it follows a 15,000-year old lawyer on his way to work, until he's crushed by a pile of falling bricks.** ''Endless Nights'' shows all the Endless around and established when the Earth was still cooling and lifeless, and the green energy of the Guardians of Oa was just a budding research project. So, at least four billion years old.** Wendel's Mound was a theatre before Shakespeare's race came to Britain.-->'''Shakespeare''': "Before the Normans?"-->'''Dream''': [[spoiler:"Before the humans."]]** ''Comicbook/TheSandmanOverture'' introduces beings even older than The Endless: [[spoiler:their parents Time (Chronos) and Night (Nyx)]].* [[MultipleChoicePast Depending on his identity,]] DC's Time Trapper is this. One possible past is [[spoiler:Superboy Prime]]. All the incarnations show the Time Trapper was born at least during the 30th-31st century, but survived to operate ''at the end of time itself''* [[spoiler:Knuckles the Echidna]] and Chaos in ''ComicBook/SonicTheComic'' was alive during the great war between the Echindnas and the Drakons which happened over eight thousand years ago.* ComicBook/VandalSavage is one of these, though you'd never know it just by looking at him. He began life as a caveman, and became immortal when exposed to [[GreenRocks a mysterious meteor]]. It was revealed in ''ComicBook/FinalCrisis: Revelations'' that [[spoiler:Savage is Cain. Yes, ''[[Literature/TheBible that]]'' Cain]]. In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague'', [[spoiler:it was shown that he was still kicking thirty thousand years after the end of the world, which, incidentally, he caused]].** Savage's arch-nemesis, the ComicBook/ResurrectionMan. Or maybe not; originally, every time he died, he reincarnated as a baby. Thanks to some scientific experimentation on his current incarnation, he now straight-up resurrects - and survives in this incarnation up through the future of ''ComicBook/DCOneMillion''.* ''ComicBook/UltimateFantasticFour'':** Namor has been imprisoned for over 9000 years. The worst this did to him was to cause a bit of muscular atrophy, like astronauts suffer from.** Likewise the Super-Skrull, the oldest living Skrull, is over a billion years old.* The setting of ''ComicBook/{{Transmetropolitan}}'' qualifies, simply because they ''dont know how old their civilization is''. Oh, they have time travel technology, and they have fixed dates for historical events at around our present and beyond - they just dont know what date it is RIGHT NOW. At some point, the ridiculously advanced society simply lost track of what date it was, they currently tell time by counting the amount of years from the historical events of their own history.* The two main antagonists of ''ComicBook/RachelRising'' are UsefulNotes/{{Lilith}} (in the popular origin story that she was Adam's first wife before Eve was created) and a FallenAngel named Malus. So both of the bad guys have been around for as long as the human species has existed, or longer.* The one-shot ''ComicBook/{{Superman}}'' story ''Strange Visitor'' depicts a Superman in a universe where he started fighting crime [[UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfComicBooks in 1938 at street-level]], but grew StrongerWithAge. By 2013, he's stronger than his mainline counterpart and has barely aged... but he finds, as the story goes on, that he's truly TheAgeless, and by the end of the story, he's literally survived to the ''heat-death of the universe''. Even moreso, [[SuperpowerLottery his power has grown to the point]] that he can ''hold back'' the heat-death of the universe, which he does so for billions of years, until the last life in the universe (the god Anu) dies. Even through all this, though, he still remembers to save a group of astronauts that were lost in time in 1939.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Fan Works]]* ''Fanfic/ACrownOfStars'': Daniel, GodEmperor of Avalon, is 452,388 years old. His wife Rayana is ''slightly'' younger... Ten or twenty thousand years younger.-->''Asuka’s brain was still refusing to process that number. He was 452,388 years old?! Stone tools weren’t that old! Fire wasn’t that old!''* In ''[[http://eloze.northcastle.co.uk/ ELOZE]]'', when speaking to the Sand Goddess, she laughs at the prospect of Ganon destroying the world.--> "THIS MEANS NOTHING TO ME. I WAS FIRST. I SHALL BE LAST. THERE WILL BE ONLY DESERT. AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING I, CHAOS, WILL RULE."* In the ''Fanfic/ProjectDarkJade'' {{Recursive Fanfic|tion}} ''Fanfic/HerShadowedRealm'', due to absorbing the Dog and Horse Talismans, Jade has CompleteImmortality, and has been trapped in the Shadow Realm so long that she was ''already'' ancient by the time Egypt started the Shadow games ''thousands of years ago!''* Spirits in [[Fanfic/HauntedMansionAndTheHatboxGhost the Mansionverse]] are functionally immortal; Ammit the Devourer (yes, [[Myth/EgyptianMythology that one]]) and the One-Eyed Black Cat, two demons of unknown origins, still remember the Egyptian gods of old, and it is theorized some of the bedsheet ghosts in the Mansion are millenia-old ghosts who have, by now, completely forgotten their mortal life, and may have been Neanderthals for all we know.* ''FanFic/TheInfiniteLoops'' will eventually turn every Looper into one of these... subjectively, anyway.* ''FanWorks/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic''** In ''[[http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/05/story-merely-mare.html Merely A Mare]]'', [[PhysicalGod Princess Luna]] casually mentions that she and her sister Celestia are more than four hundred million years old. Pinkie Pie, [[CloudCuckooLander being Pinkie Pie]], wonders how she'll ever fit that many candles on her birthday cake.** ''FanFic/TheGodEmpressOfPonykind'' cranks this UpToEleven when [[GodEmperor Princess Celestia]] mentions her true age...which is a bit upwards of ''four billion'' years old.** Pony fanfiction in general likes to dwell on the princesses' staggering, incomprehensible age. [[WhoWantsToLiveForever Sometimes it's not pretty.]] [[LivingForeverIsAwesome Sometimes it just]] [[CloudCuckoolander makes them willing]] [[WeirdnessCoupon to be a bit kooky]] because they have the perspective to know it'll all blow over in a few decades.** In the ''Fanfic/PonyPOVSeries'', the Concepts (including which Celestia, Luna, and Discord) are this if they didn't [[DeityOfHumanOrigin use to be a pony]]. Celestia reveals at one point she was present for the ''Big Bang'', meaning she's at least 13 billion years old -- and she's one of the ''younger'' Concepts. That also doesn't take into account the fact time doesn't exist as we know it in the spirit world and they are likely far older than that. If only her physical body is taken into account, she's still several thousand years old The [[TopGod Elders]] are even older, predating ''time itself''. and have seen the birth and death of the universe ''several'' times. In fact, Fauna Luster is the ''birth'' of the universe and Entropy is its death.*** Tirek and the Moochick are both so old [[spoiler:they predate ponies as a sapient species.]]* In ''FanFic/ThingsWeDontTellHumans'', along with the canon Time Abyss Alpha Trion, Jetfire/Skyfire is also that old. It's heavily implied that he was the consort of one of the original Primes.* In ''FanFic/TopDog'', the roots of wizardry come from an ancient, powerfully magical civilization that existed on Earth about seventy thousand years ago. They created a race of {{Voluntary Shapeshift|ing}}ers to serve as shock troops in war, and, predictably enough, [[TurnedAgainstTheirMasters were destroyed by them]]. Those shapeshifters later became the Amerai, and the clan heads are still almost all original created Amerai, rather than newer born.* From ''Roleplay/YukariIsFree'', [[AbsoluteXenophobe B-3-K]] claims to be over 400,000 years old, and that the alien force she [[AssInAmbassador heralds]], [[HordeOfAlienLocusts the Cluster]], are even older.* The Originals of ''Fanfic/TheUniversiad'' have lived for twelve thousand years.* The Eternal War of ''FanFic/SonicXDarkChaos'' has raged between the Angels and Demons for five hundred ''trillion'' years. Maledict and Allysion are even older than that; they helped create the entire universe several times over.* [[Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion Shinji]] in ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8984362/10/Alpha-and-Omega Alpha and Omega]]'' has been estimated to be ''1.68 decillion years'' old (That's 33 zeroes. Or to put it another way, he's lived through roughly a billion ''billion'' universes).** Near the end, Shinji realizes one of the [[EldritchAbomination Leviathans]] is even ''older'' than he is.* ''Fanfic/ANewChanceSeries'': Many of the older Legendary Pokemon have been around for millions of years. [[spoiler: A century in a Soul Dew doesn't really bother Father Latios as much as missing out on raising his children.]] The infant Lugia encountered in the Whirl Islands is alone older than human history.* The ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitans'' fic ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10258420/1/Belonging Belonging]]'' features Kishar, a female demon who, along with her friends, imprisoned Trigon in another dimension ''two hundred million years ago''. The friends made a HeroicSacrifice, while she remained guarding the prison. In the end, she got bored and created humanity to have some company. Toward the end of the story, Kishar summons Death (to discuss the repercussions of a certain difficult choice made) and casually mentions it's been nearly a billion years since she last did that.* ''FanFic/ParisBurning'' has the personifications of some of the world's oldest cities, such as Jerusalem or Athens. Older still are the beings Cities consider to be the first of their kind, immortals of mysterious origin who reside in Africa and witnessed the birth of the first creatures we would recognize as human. And older, possibly, than ''them'' are the [[EldritchAbomination Things]] that sleep in the depths of the earth, one of which once said, [[http://thecitysmith.tumblr.com/post/73883673272/and-what-of-the-walls-and-borders-that-were-pounded-and "We do not feel pain because we existed before it."]]* In ''Fanfic/HopeForTheHeartless'':** [[{{Omnipotence}} The]] [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Invisibles]], creations and servants of [[CosmicEntities the Fates]] themselves, are stated to have existed for a millennium.** [[AncientEvil Arawn]], the [[NamesToRunAwayFrom/{{Nouns}} Death]] [[NamesToRunAwayFrom/{{Titles}} Lord]] of Annuvin, who died several centuries ago, is revealed to have existed centuries (possibly millennia) before that through various means.* ''FanFic/ThePiecesLieWhereTheyFell'': [[spoiler: the Nightmare is old enough that it cannot even remember if it was male or female.]][[/folder]]

[[folder:Film]]* [[Creator/LeonardNimoy King Keshekhim Nedakh]] from ''Disney/AtlantisTheLostEmpire'' is apparently over a hundred thousand years old when he died in 1914 (the year the film's events took place). His daughter, on the other hand, [[Really700YearsOld is approximately their equivalent of a teenager, despite being eighty-eight hundred years old]].* The Antareans in ''Film/{{Cocoon}}''. The first base they built here on Earth? It was ''{{Atlantis}}''.--> '''Walter''': Every ten or eleven thousand years or so, I make a terrible mistake.* The creature that possesses the body of Grant Grant in ''Film/{{Slither}}'' claims to have been around for a billion years, which is likely considering that it travels from planet to planet via meteorite, a mode of transportation that takes tens of millions of years at minimum. * John [[PunnyName Oldman]] from ''Film/TheManFromEarth'' is just about fourteen thousand years old, according to his own count.* The nameless monster from ''No Such Thing'', played by Robert John Burke, gives a speech about how he was there "When you were young", referring to life on Earth itself, in which he mentions that the period of time before we evolved into fish (i.e. the Precambrian era) was very boring for him.* The Djinn in ''Film/{{Wishmaster}}'' uses the most extreme variation, noting that his kind is older than time itself, possibly unintentionally created by God, and stuck in the void between worlds.* Godzilla is suggested in the ''Film/{{Godzilla 2014}}'' prequel comic to have survived the Permian Extinction and shifted between dormancy and active hunting across two hundred fifty million years, appearing at various points throughout human history. The [=MUTO=]s eggs laid dormant in a massive skeleton for millions of years.* Malekith and the Dark Elves from ''Film/ThorTheDarkWorld'', who have waited in hibernation for thousands of years since losing the war against the Asgardians. Their race has existed since before the universe, and Malekith seems to remember the time before the light.* In ''Film/JupiterAscending'', the late Abrasax Matriarch was over 91 ''thousand'' years old when she died. Of the "younger" generation Kalique recently passed the 14 millennia mark and she's the ''middle'' child. * In ''WesternAnimation/{{Minions}}'', it's hinted that at least ''some'' of the titular creatures may be the same ones that emerged from the ocean during the Cretaceous, and that they may even have existed since the dawn of life as single-celled organisms.* In ''Film/TheLastWitchHunter'', the Witch Queen claims to remember the times before mankind. Depending on which hominid you consider to be human already, her lifespan could be measured in millions of years.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Literature]]* Dwellers in ''[[Creator/IainBanks The Algebraist]]'' are old enough, and patient enough, to have populated the entire galaxy. Without faster than light drives. Individuals are explicitly said to be ''billions'' of years old, which means that dwellers are essentially a first-generation society.* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}''** The Chee are androids who came to Earth before human civilization and have since lived through most of human history. Erek, the one we see most often, casually mentions that he helped build the pyramids, among other things. (Though he just helped haul stones, an interesting subversion of the AncientAstronauts theory.)** The Ellimist, who was already millions of years old when Earth was just beginning to form.* ''Circus of the Damned'', the third ''Literature/AnitaBlake'' novel, features a vampire named Mr. Oliver who claimed to be "older than time" which she took as hollow boasting until she realized he wasn't a human vampire, but a ''Homo erectus'' vampire. Due to the SortingAlgorithmOfEvil, he went down far more easily than many enemies since then, making him rather disappointing in retrospect.* Creator/ArthurCClarke:** The LostTechnology spacecraft Rama in ''Literature/RendezvousWithRama''. [[spoiler: However, the sequels show that Rama is actually much newer than it seems, or at least undergoes maintenance fairly often.]]** In ''Literature/TheCityAndTheStars'', Diaspar has survived a billion years.* Creator/JaneLindskold wrote the ''Athanor'' duology, where the title character of the first book, ''Changer'', was literally one of the first two life forms on the planet, even before there were continents.* Any and all demon-like entities in ''Literature/TheBartimaeusTrilogy''. For example, Bartimaeus used to be best friends with Ptolemy, and at that point, he was about 3000 years old.* The Disciples of Aldur and Torak in Creator/DavidEddings's ''[[Literature/TheBelgariad Belgariad]]'' and ''Malloreon''. Polgara is the youngest coming in at a "mere" three thousand years old when the series begins. Belgarath himself is the oldest at seven thousand and shows no signs of dying any time soon. They don't generally act it, but they can be very casual in mentioning events that happened centuries previously in ways that other characters find disconcerting. The {{Prequel}} ''Belgarath the Sorcerer'' really hammers it home when you realise that he's almost as old as human civilization itself.* The term is used explicitly in the tenth book of ''Literature/TheBlackCompany'' by Glen Cook, as Blade ponders the perspective of [[spoiler:the demon Shivetya, who is nearly as old as the plain of glittering stone between worlds and]] who may be as old as (or older than) the gods themselves. If the gods can be said to have properly existed.* Saetan, Andulvar, Mephis, Prothvar, Hekatah, and Cassandra from the ''Literature/BlackJewels'' series, all remember a cataclysmic war ''fifty thousand years ago'', Cassandra more so than rest, as she is from a short-lived race among the Blood, meaning her natural lifespan should have been one fifty, ''at best'', compared to the five thousand of the long lived races, never mind Geoffrey, Draca or Lorn, the first being from an ancient race long, long forgotten even fifty thousand years ago, the latter two being dragons who ''created'' the Blood in the first place.* In ''Literature/BoundarysFall'', High Wizard Aemon (around five thousand) and Emperor Alwellyn of the elves (over six). In fact, Alwellyn is only the second Emperor the elves have ever had.* [[TheTrickster Robin Goodfellow]] in Rob Thurman's ''Literature/CalLeandros'' series casually mentions his encounters with famous historical and mythological figures, from Freud to Bacchus. He also mentions being around since before humans came out of the caves. Although he never comes out and says it, it is surmised that he is hundreds of thousands of years old.* ''Literature/CodexAlera'' has [[spoiler:Alera, basically the AnthropomorphicPersonification of the country]], who remembers the last few ''ice ages''. "I have seen thousands of millions of years, Octavian."* In ''Literature/{{Cosmicomics}}'', Qfwfq recalls memories from ''before'' the Big Bang.* ''Days of Solomon Gursky'' begins with a normal human discovering the secret of living on after death via nanites as a result of a tiny choice he makes. He ultimately lives until the end of the universe as an increasingly powerful post-human but regrets having lost his wife. At the end of the universe he and other galaxy-sized super-beings use the collapse of reality to create new simulations of the universe, letting him outlive his own universe. [[spoiler:However, the new universe is one in which he makes the opposite choice and doesn't discover immortality.]]* [[spoiler:The Flowing Queen]] from the ''Literature/DarkReflectionsTrilogy'' not only happens to be one of the old gods, who walked the Earth long before ancient Egypt, but also is stated to be older than any form of life in a sea.* [[spoiler:The Salaxalan ghost]] in ''Literature/DirkGentlysHolisticDetectiveAgency''. He has been around literally since the beginning of life on Earth, which means that he literally spent two billion years surrounded by mud and "slimy things with legs". The time has driven him... a little bonkers.* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}''** In ''Discworld/GoingPostal'', Anghammarad is a nineteen-thousand-year-old golem who finds work as a post officer. He expects to ''wait for the next universe'' (golems believe time goes in circles), so he will be able to deliver that one message he couldn't. As he says about "big green things with teeth". Bigger. Greener. More teeth. Quite appropriately, he is given the position of '''Extremely'' Senior Postman'.*** And he/it's a comparative newcomer compared to the Golems of Um in ''Discworld/MakingMoney'', none of whom are less than twenty thousand years old (they don't speak the same common language, and that's at least twenty thousand years old), and some may be as much as sixty thousand years old.** In ''Discworld/{{Hogfather}}'', the first Bogeyman reminisces about the days before men had fire and metal, when the continents were different. Anybody who lives in his realm will never die, simply [[EverythingFades fade away]].--->''"You don't die here. You just get old... listening to the laughter..."''** Similarly, the Elf king in ''Discworld/LordsAndLadies'' dreams not just of such a time in the past that he witnessed personally and ruled over, but of ''the time to come'' when such will happen.** The AnthropomorphicPersonification of Time is described as old, not for humans, but old like darkness and stars.** And then, of course, there is [[TheGrimReaper Death]], who was there when the first lifeform died, and whose job it will be, at the end of the universe, to metaphorically put all the chairs on the tables and turn out the lights. Then there's ''his'' boss, Azrael, the Death of Universes, who can think on the answer to a question for long enough that a star can be born, live, die, and collapse into a black hole, and whose body parts are most easily measured in terms of the speed of light.*** According to ''Discworld/{{Eric}}'', Death won't just be there to metaphorically "close up shop" but he'll be there when the next universe starts up.** Dios in ''Discworld/{{Pyramids}}''. At first glance, he is merely middle-aged or elderly. It quickly becomes apparent that he has some kind of personal knowledge of the past six thousand years of his country's history. At the end of the novel, it's shown that [[spoiler:he is, more or less, a living StableTimeLoop. In one sense, that means he's as old as ETERNITY, but he only experiences it six thousand years at a time. "Only."]]** In ''Discworld/TheLastContinent'', the Luggage spends so many millennia buried under the soils of XXXX that a layer of opal forms on its surface. While this ''could'' be a case of sleeping through the Time Abyss, it's awake and bored enough to be even more pissed than normal when someone finally digs it up.*** Similarly, in ''Discworld/TheScienceOfDiscworld'', the Luggage gets stuck in the earth on our world for a couple of geological periods.** The Great A'tuin and the four elephants who stand on his back. How many millennia have they watched the play of stars and felt the feet of mortals walking upon their backs?* The dragons introduced in Creator/DianeDuane's ''[[Literature/TheTaleOfTheFive The Door into Shadow]]'' can live to be thousands of years old and can remember clearly enough to calculate their ages by counting sunrises backwards. Furthermore, they also inherit the memories of their ancestors, although those memories tend to fade over a large number of generations as they're spread over a progressively larger number of descendants.* In Creator/HughLofting's ''Literature/DoctorDolittlesPostOffice'', Dr. Dolittle encounters Mudface, the turtle who was a passenger on Noah's Ark. In a posthumously published volume, ''Dr. Dolittle and the Secret Lake'', we eventually get to hear the Mudface's story of the Great Flood which is alluded to, but not presented, in the earlier volume.* The eponymous villain of the ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' spin-off novel ''Literature/{{Drachenfels}}'' (written by Creator/KimNewman) has prolonged his life through dark magic for thousands of years, and can recall living through events that are now dismissed as superstitious myths. (And when he finally dies, his last thought is the realization that, despite this, his entire lifespan is still only an eyeblink in time.)* In the ''Literature/{{Dragaera}}'' series, Sethra Lavode: a vampire sorceress at least a quarter-million years old, with enough power to make gods nervous. [[DidWeJustHaveTeaWithCthulhu She's friends with Vlad and likes to have people over to dinner.]]* ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles''** Nicodemus and Tessa are two humans who act as hosts to {{fallen angel}}s. Tessa ([[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld who looks 14-ish]]) was sold as a slave in ancient Egypt, before she met Nicodemus (who was already immortal and old at that point) and he gave her a coin containing her Fallen Angel. Nicodemus's precise age is unknown, as he makes a point to destroy the church's records of him every few centuries, but he wears the rope Judas used to hang himself around his neck as a tie. The angels that inhabit them are even older. At one point, Lasciel mocks the idea of Harry trying to change her mind, pointing out that if she hasn't in the thousands of years since she fell, he certainly isn't going to make a difference. Additionally, she boasts of living through "infinite thousands" of years, which might as well be true if the [[{{God}} White God]] of the series is the actual creator of the universe.** WordOfGod implies that [[GeniusLoci Demonreach]] predates the ice age. ''Cold Days'' gives the creation of [[spoiler:[[SealedEvilInACan The Well]]]] as around seventy-five thousand years ago ([[spoiler:[[TimeyWimeyBall yet still simultaneously created a few thousand years after that, and after that, and after that]]]]), and it can be assumed that Demonreach came into being then or shortly (relatively) thereafter.** The [[OurVampiresAreDifferent Red King]] is a textbook example. Humanity doesn't know how old he is, because they haven't had a written language that long.** [[TheFairFolk Mab]] is comfortably older than human civilization (Mother Winter is even older). The construct Archive (not its hosts, who expire) is also somewhere in the region of five millennia old. Then there are the various gods who are at least as old as their religions - so some of them will qualify. We also have the Old Ones, ancient {{Eldritch Abomination}}s who have been banished from the world in ancient times - but are probably far older than that. In short, The Dresden Files is ''full'' of examples.* J'osui C'reln Reyr, the "Creature Doomed to Live" in ''Literature/TheElricSaga'' novel ''The Sailor on the Seas of Fate'', who disobeyed Arioch and was condemned to live until he returned, ten thousand years later.* Mr. Turtle in ''An Exaltation of Larks'' by Creator/RobertReed. Mr. Turtle is essentially a time traveler from the end of the universe where entropy has reached maximum and the underlying fabric of reality begins to break down - meaning he is at least a trillion years old. When the protagonist conjures up a number for his age (one hundred billion), Mr. Turtle simply laughs.* ''Literature/FateOfTheJedi'' has [[EldritchAbomination Abeloth]].* Damon Julian of ''Literature/FevreDream'' is old even by vampire standards. It's impossible to say exactly how old, because he was born ''before vampires had language''. At one point, his rival Joshua York argues that Damon isn't really evil, because deep down, part of him is still just a wild animal that can't imagine survival without killing weaker animals.* The ''Literature/GreatShip'' universe features numerous characters that are tens or hundreds of thousands of years old - the vast majority of humanity are [[HealingFactor nigh-unkillable]] {{Transhuman}}s. Quee Lee, a recurring character, was originally born on Earth eons ago - and was one of the first people to receive the immortality treatments and emergency genes. The short story ''Alone'' features a sentient robot which has been walking the hull of the [[PlanetSpaceship Great Ship]] for so long that it no longer remembers its name, function, or origin.* The short story "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" by Creator/CliffordSimak has an immortal human who was at least twenty-thousand years old. He tells an archeologist friend that he has learned to survive by "being on the fringes, always an observer, never a participant."* Luthe's teacher Goriolo in Creator/RobinMcKinley's ''Literature/TheHeroAndTheCrown'' "could almost remember when the moon was hung in the sky." The heroine's late mother studied with Luthe. For calibration, Luthe remembers the previous active Great Dragon, "one hundred generations ago".* Several beings and even races in Andrey Livadny's ''Literature/TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' have lost count at several ''billion'' years old. While this may put them in the {{Precursor|s}} category, they are ''still around''. One novel in particular deals with an {{Energy Being|s}} living in the magnetic fields of a gas giant that members of a LostColony call God. A scientist contacts the being and finds out that it is the oldest being in the galaxy and, possibly, the universe. The mindless Forerunners that were originally thought to be the oldest lifeforms in the universe were, in fact, this being's creations meant to carry it from its dying homeworld to other gas giants. The Forerunners also had rudimentary DNA, and many of them ended up dying on planets... starting biological life. So, yes, this being ''is'' God in this sense. Others, while younger, include the Evolgs, a race of EnergyBeings, and the Emulotti, HumanAliens whom the Evolgs helped [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence become like them]] to escape a race of AbusivePrecursors known as the Shvergs. All this happened billions of years ago, and still-functional Emulotti/Evolg machinery has been found. This kinda puts the other, better known races, who have been around ''only'' three million years ago, into the category of "just happened."* Marvin the Paranoid Android in ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''. In ''Literature/TheRestaurantAtTheEndOfTheUniverse'' he ends up thirty-seven times older than the universe due to incautious use of time travel. It starts when he's stuck on a planet from circa 1980 through ''the end of time''. -->"The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million, they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline."* The Souls from ''Literature/TheHost''. They have been around for millennia and can live forever. They even spend up to centuries in hibernation when they are traveling in space. At one point, Wanderer, who has lost track of her own age she's been around so long, can only pinpoint an event as being "after the dinosaurs lived on Earth". * The titular creatures from "Literature/TheHoundsOfTindalos" by Creator/FrankBelknapLong are from an age "before space and time". They can move casually through the angles of time, to hunt those humans who have travelled in time and devour them.* A frequent theme in Creator/HPLovecraft's stories, where the characters find themselves in awe and dread of what primordial secrets they learn about, and usually find at the end that something from those times still lives, or at least exists actively even if they're not alive in the usual sense.** In ''Literature/AtTheMountainsOfMadness'', the city of the Elder Things had been continuously inhabited since the Earth was young, for billions of years. The same applies for [[spoiler:whatever it is that lies beyond the titular mountains]].** In "The Haunter of the Dark", the protagonist writes down the history of an [[ArtifactOfDoom ancient artifact]] after gazing into it. Said artifact was originally created on planet Yuggoth (AKA Pluto), and came into the possession of the aforementioned Elder Things on Earth billions of years ago. Later it was worshiped by a race of serpent-men in [[Franchise/ConanTheBarbarian ancient Hyperborea]], until it was lost for millions of years before being found by the first humans in Lemuria and millennia later again in ancient Egypt, where the eponymous Avatar of the god Nyarlathotep was given its familiar name, and was involved in the fall of an entire dynasty. A few thousand years later it was found in the ruins of a temple and brought to Providence, where an occult cult formed around it.** Yog-Sothoth is the Gate. Yog-Sothoth is the Key. Time and space are one in Yog-Sothoth, for he is the All-in-One and the One-in-All. He knows and sees all that is, all that was and all that will be. He knows the answer to every question but only very brave or very foolish mortals would dare to ask him, for the price of ultimate knowledge is great indeed.** All other Outer Gods and Great Old Ones count too; while Yog-Sothoth is unique in existing in the past, present and future at the same time, all Outer Gods are impossibly ancient (older than all of space and time, in fact). Great Old Ones are millions or billions of years old too, although they have spent a portion of it in hibernation when the stars aren't right for them.** Azathoth, seeing as he is the creator of the universe (not that he noticed it...)** "Literature/TheShadowOutOfTime" plays this to full effect by having the older-than-humanity scroll written in the [[spoiler:narrator's own handwriting]]. While the scroll's writer {{time travel}}ed, the scroll itself, and what remains of the Great Race's city (not very much, really) are still over 200 million years old, and are both expected to last at least as long into the future.** The eponymous city in "The Nameless City".** Casually {{exaggerated}} in "Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu", in which the narration claims that Cthulhu is rising for the first time in ''vigintillions'' of years. Depending on whether it's in American or British notation, that's either Ten-to-the-63rd or Ten-to-the-'''120th''' years, or a ''vastly'' greater span of time than the duration of the known universe.* Creator/IsaacAsimov** R. Daneel Olivaw, AKA [[spoiler:Eto Demerzel]], AKA [[spoiler:Chetter Hummin]] is 22,000 years old at the end of [[spoiler:''Literature/FoundationAndEarth'']]. Gaia, a [[GeniusLoci living planet]] is also very old, but younger than Daneel. Its exact age is unknown, but is estimated to be rougly 19,000 years.** The short story ''The Last Answer'' (not to be confused with the vastly more famous ''The Last Question'') features a timeless entity that says it has no beginning or end, and simply ''is''. Notably, the entity itself is not entirely pleased with this; for this reason it has [[spoiler:created the entire universe, from which it harvests minds that it forces to think - eternally - for a way of ending itself]].** Speaking of ''Literature/TheLastQuestion'', [[spoiler: the AC. It has the memories of the first big AC on Earth. The story ends some unspecified (but extremely long) time after the ''heat death of the universe'']].* In ''Literature/{{Larklight}}'', it turns out that [[spoiler:Art and Myrtle's mother]] is a member of a race known as Shapers, so-called because they play an important role in ''creating solar systems''.* Creator/LarryNiven** "Cautionary Tale" has an alien over ten thousand years old on a fruitless search for immortality.** Several of the ''[[Literature/TheDracoTavern Draco Tavern]]'' stories deal with this: "The Death Addict"'s danger-seeking alien doesn't have a specific age given, but he's afraid of living long enough to be "the last cluster of protons in the universe". The Chirpsithra have immense lifespans: one in "The Green Marauder" is almost two billion - though relativistic TimeDilation makes her subjective age somewhat less - and visited Earth before its atmosphere had oxygen.** In ''Literature/RingworldsChildren'', the Protector Proserpina is around a million years old.** For human characters, Douglas Hooker from "Literature/TheEthicsOfMadness" becomes Literature/KnownSpace's record-holder for this trope, once he's spent 120,000 years (give or take a few centuries) fleeing his nemesis's vessel in a one-man ramship.* In ''Literature/TheLastRune'' series of books some of the Old Gods may have been around for long enough to fit this trope, but the dragons, who predate the creation of the universe, ''definitely'' qualify.* The Arisians in the ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' series. Some of them are two billion years old, and they are capable of plans spanning the entire run of human history.* ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings''** [[WhenTreesAttack Treebeard]], who's said to be the oldest of all living things, and Tom Bombadil, who claims to be older than the Earth. {{Lampshaded}} when Treebeard refers to the ancient wizard Gandalf as "''young'' Master Gandalf".** Both Ents and Elves are not subject to dying of old age, though Ents get "sleepy" and more and more tree-like as they age, and Elves eventually get "weary" of watching all the death and decay in Middle-Earth and decide to leave it to go to the Undying Lands. Fangorn (Treebeard) is unusual in the fact that he's still active despite being one of the first Ents. Most of the ''really'' old Elves in Middle-Earth in Frodo's day have been forbidden to (re-) enter Valinor unless/until they humble themselves and repent.** Elrond has outlived every nation in the world, but he's still a kid compared to Glorfindel (well, [[BackFromTheDead kind of]]) and Galadriel, who is, in some materials, described as being ''older than the'' '''''sun'''''[[note]]as in, she can remember watching it rise for the first time ever[[/note]], though the sun is relatively young (about 7000 years old at the time of the War of the Ring) in the [=LotRverse=].** Círdan, described and only actually seen once, is the oldest Elf around and mentioned at the time of the War of the Ring. He was probably among the first to awaken of the elves at least 11,000 years prior to the War of the Ring[[note]]depending on the conversion factor between Valian years and Solar years, for which Tolkien gave several different values, at the time of the War of the Ring, Cirdan may be over ''70,000'' (Solar) years old[[/note]]. He's old enough to have a long, white beard. Elves don't grow beards [[WordOfGod until their third cycle in life, each cycle takes a few millennia]].** Gandalf, Radagast, Saruman, and Sauron are actually just 2,000 year old, temporary forms of the Maiar (i.e Angels), all of whom entered Eä (the universe) at the beginning of time. Sauron's particular physical form is older than the others (it was [[ShapeshifterModeLock fixed]] after the Fall of Numenor, over 3,000 years before the War of the Ring), and he had a load of other shapes before that.** [[TheDragon The Witch-King]] is close to 5,000 years old, though he doesn't quite make it. He lasts 4800 years or so.** Gandalf states that there exist [[EldritchAbomination creatures even older than Sauron]], which can be reconciled with the above in at least two ways, but [[MetaphoricallyTrue only with careful interpretation]].** ''Literature/TheSilmarillion'': Galadriel is indeed ancient, but one will be astonished when they discover that her parents Finarfin and Eärwen are apparently still alive in Valinor. Finarfin's mother Indis is presumably living there too, as well as Eärwen's father Olwë and his unnamed wife. All of them are at least 12,000 years old. So Galadriel not only has a living mother and father, but ''three'' living grandparents. Source material establishes that Elves ''never''[[note]]Barring divine intervention in one or two cases[[/note]] die permanently from the world, and that their "underworld" is sort of a penalty box.*** It's also likely that Fëanor's widow Nerdanel still lives in Valinor, too. She's older than Finarfin and his wife, but still younger than Indis and Olwë.*** The Ainur (Valar and Maiar), as well as Ungoliant, are truly ageless, all of them being older than the physical planet. How ''much'' older, or even if that has any real meaning to such beings, is never elaborated on.** Ungoliant stands out the most of all these beings as nobody, not even the Valar, knows what the hell she actually is. The best they can come up with is that she's some kind of monster from the void surrounding reality. This means she might be the only thing to rival Eru (God) in age as she's the only thing in the story that ''isn't'' one of his creations.* In ''Literature/TheLorax'', the titular creature is as old as time itself.* ''Literature/MalazanBookOfTheFallen'' by Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont has a background story going back 300,000 years. And many of the gods and Ascendants were old even back then.** Kallor, the High King, has notched up a hundred thousand years, without the benefit of Ascension even (long story short, he was cursed with immortality but not eternal youth for being such a genocidal bastard).** The T'lan Imass, an extremely important race in the world's history, have each lived for over 300,000 years. They have passed this time hunting down and exterminating all remnants of the Jaghut, who had oppressed them in that distant past. Their racial history goes back into unknowable distances, until 300,000 years before the main story, when nearly all those who still survived took part in a necromantic ritual that made them all undead.** Anomander Rake. He was the first son of the goddess that created existence. (Well, except for the warren of chaos and the {{eldritch abomination}}s in it.) The Tiste Andii lived for at least thousands of years in their warren before they emerged into the normal world over 300000 years ago. [[WhoWantsToLiveForever They're so old they don't want to live any more]]. They just don't care.** The Errant was around by the time ''Literature/TheKharkanasTrilogy'' prequel takes place and is still alive and kicking during the main series, making him older than many of the current gods of the setting and wittness to the rise and fall of entire civilizations.* In ''Literature/MemorySorrowAndThorn'', the Norn Queen is the oldest living thing on the planet, more than twice as old as her closest competition. Said competition is Amerasu, matriarch of the [[TheFairFolk Sithi]], who is millennia old and revered as an ancient even by a race of immortals. Exactly how old that makes the Norn Queen probably doesn't bear thinking about. * [[MeaningfulName Master Secundus Minutius Hora]], the keeper of time from ''Literature/{{Momo}}'' by Creator/MichaelEnde. His apparent age fluctuates wildly, but twice he's described as "old, not as an old man, but as a mountain".* In ''Literature/TheNightLand'' by William Hope Hodgson, the Great Redoubt is an incredibly ancient [[CityInABottle City in a Pyramid]], with a history that "dealt not with odd thousands of years; but with very millions; aye, away back into what they of that Age conceived to be the early days of the earth, when the sun, maybe, still gloomed dully..."* In the ''Literature/ParrishPlessis'' series, [[spoiler:Brilliance is a ''Homo erectus'', making her over a million years old. She was infected with TheCorruption, but managed to suppress and harness it to gain eternal life]].* ''Literature/ThePowerOfFive'': [[spoiler: The Librarian]], and the [[EldritchAbomination Old Ones]].* Remy Chandler, a.k.a. Seraph Remiel, of the ''Remy Chandler Novels'', remembers, among other things, the War in Heaven, watching Noah as he built the Ark, and a time when humans carried melee weapons around as naturally as modern people carry [=iPods=] and cell phones. His memories are interspersed with very recent recollections (less than fifty years at the outside) of his wife, his dog, and his friend, which lends the times when he does remember way back an air of authenticity.* In Creator/AlastairReynolds' ''Literature/RevelationSpace'' series:** The Inhibitors, a race of genocidal machines dedicated to wiping out all civilizations they deem too advanced, are millions of years old, perhaps even older. Interestingly, [[spoiler:their ultimate purpose will not be fulfilled for another three billion years]].** In the first novel, the "Sun Stealer" has been around for at least 900,000 years, [[BodySurf Body Surfing]] from person to person. * In ''Literature/TheSecretsOfTheImmortalNicholasFlamel'', most of the Immortals are centuries old at the very least, but that's nothing compared to the beings that ruled the world before Humans: The Next Generation are thousands of years old, and are still adolescents compared to the Elders, who in turn were young compared to the Great Elders. The Archons are even older, the Ancients were around before them, and the oldest are the Earthlords, who are at ''least'' tens of millions of years old.* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire''** The Wall is said to have been built over 8000 years ago.** The weirwoods don't die of old age; some might be around in Westeros from before the Age of Dawn (~12000 years).** However, note that history is unreliable in-universe. MedievalStasis appears in this world, and there are hints that there's a story-relevant reason for it. So the Wall and weirwoods *may* be as old as we're told, but maybe not. * The Lilim in ''Literature/{{Stardust}}'' are described as being old enough to have noticed continental shift and oceanic movements. At one point, the youngest of them looks out over a ''petrified forest'' and recalls when it was a collection of seedlings.* Creator/CharlesSheffield's ''Tomorrow and Tomorrow'' is about a man who has his wife [[HumanPopsicle cryogenically frozen]] to search for a cure to a nonspecific brain malady. He himself is frozen, after reading up on contemporary music to provide research as a reason to thaw him out. No matter how far into the future he goes, however, his wife's illness is never cured. Eventually most of humanity [[{{Transhuman}} transcends its former species]] and leaves him in the dust. His body eventually falls apart from all the freezing and thawing and his brain [[BrainUploading gets uploaded into a computer.]] Eons pass, he gets cloned a few billion times, merges with the clones, becomes a god, and restores his wife on his own. The end.* In ''Literature/WarOfTheDreaming'' by Creator/JohnCWright, this applies to Oberon and Titania, who were around long before humans, and are implied to have been there when life first evolved on earth.* Creator/JackChalker's ''Literature/WellWorld'' has Nathan Brazil, who is as old as they come and then some, pull this one sometimes. He claims to have ''rebooted the Universe'' several times. But then, he also admits to being a very talented compulsive liar.* ''Literature/AWrinkleInTime''** Mrs Whatsit gives her age as some absurdly precise number in the billions of years (2,379,152,497 years, 8 months, and 3-days-old exactly). She is still far younger than Mrs Who and Mrs Which.** [[GreaterScopeVillain The Black Thing]] is probably almost as old as time.* ''Literature/XeeleeSequence'' ** The Xeelee themselves are only 200 million years younger than the Universe itself. They created the Antixeelee made of Tachyons to take their seeds back in time to when Baryonic matter becomes stable enough for them to exist. They then spend the next 10 billion years building a great attractor to leave this existence. Some Xeelee have seen the entire universe from the beginning.** A group of humans known as the "Jasofts" - [[LesCollaborateurs Collaborators]] with the alien overlords who conquered Earth, who were given eternal life in return.-->''My name is Luru Parz. I was born in the year AD 5279, as humans once counted time. Now I have lived so long that such dates have no meaning. We have lost the years, lost them in orders of magnitude.''* ''Literature/NeedfulThings'': [[spoiler:Leeland Gaunt]] has been roaming the Earth for ages, playing his sick mind games with people all throughout history.* Creator/RobertSilverberg's ''Across a Billion Years'' features archaeologists searching for artifacts of an ancient race which disappeared about that long ago. Throughout the novel, they first discover some sentient robots, and toward the end, the remnants of the race itself... a few thousand mindless husks on life support. It has been fifty thousand years since one died. Four million years since one was born.* The last part of ''Literature/TheWorldAtTheEndOfTime'', set at 10^40 years in the future (see the Literature folder on the Quotes section), has the [[StarfishAliens plasma-based]] entity Wan-To, who lives inside stars, precariously surviving in proton decay-produced energy and pondering to leave its dead star at its time to go to a black hole where he'll be able to live much longer before that finally decays too.[[spoiler:Viktor Sorricaine, the main human protagonist of the novel, is faring much better having lived to those faraway times too thanks to both relativistic time dilation and [[HumanPopsicle suspended animation]].]]* R. Scott Bakker's ''Literature/SecondApocalypse'' has the [[OurElvesAreBetter Nonmen]], a race that was cursed with immortality, which their minds are not equipped to handle. After tens of thousands of years, they tend to suffer from TheFogOfAges and forget most of their lives. Those among them called Erratics can only remember something if it's associated with pain and suffering. They're driven to kill everything they love so that they can lock it in their minds.* Zarathan, the setting of ''Literature/TheBalancedSword'', has gods, demons, Ancient Saurans ({{Precursors}} who never went anywhere), and a few very long-lived wizards, so it happens more often than you might think that a character casually mentions how this reminds them of something that happened to them four hundred thousand years ago.* Pretty much any book about astronomy that deals with the future of the Universe will feature a TimeAbyss. Such an example is ''Deep Time'', a book that follows the life of a proton from shortly after the Big Bang to the very far future when it disintegrates because of proton decay, going even much further away with a positron born in the latter event. * Creator/BrandonSanderson:** ''Literature/WaxAndWayne'': The older kandra (revered as Faceless Immortals carrying out God's will) are often treated this way. They have centuries of experience infiltrating and manipulating human culture, and are in fact older than the world itself. The thing is, the world is only a few hundred years old, since God had to restructure the old, dying world in order to save everyone. So they are ''technically'' not examples. Note that the younger kandra are also older than the world (if only by a century or two), but they don't act with the same age because they were mostly confined to their Homeland before the world was changed.** ''Literature/TheStormlightArchive'': The ten Heralds of the Almighty are at absolute minimum four and a half thousand years old; they spent an unknown amount of time (but more than a few centuries) being repeatedly resurrected to help humanity fight off the [[EndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt Desolations]], until they [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere finally had enough and gave up their oaths]]. They wandered the world in anonymity for four thousand years, [[SanitySlippage slowly going more and more insane]].** Then there's Hoid. He's been seen in every series in ''Literature/TheCosmere'', including ones that were centuries apart, and looks as old as he wants to. In ''Literature/{{Oathbringer}}'', Shallan asks him if he's a Herald, and when he confirms he's not that, she asks if he's as old as they are. He says that he had lived dozens of lifetimes before they were even born. He was present at the [[{{Gotterdammerung}} Shattering of Adonalsium]], making him roughly the same age as all the original [[OurGodsAreDifferent Shards]].--->'''Hoid:''' Some men, as they age, grow kinder. I am not one of those, for I have seen how the cosmere can mistreat the innocent--and that leaves me disinclined toward kindness. Some men, as they age, grow wiser. I am not one of those, for wisdom and I have always been at cross-purposes, and I have yet to learn the tongue in which she speaks. Some men, as they age, grow more cynical. I, fortunately, am not one of those. If I were, the very air would warp around me, sucking in all emotion, leaving only scorn. Other men... other men, as they age, merely grow stranger. I fear that I ''am'' one of those. I am the bones of a foreign species left drying on the plain that was once, long ago, a sea. A curiosity, perhaps a reminder, that all has not always been as it is now.* In ''Literature/TheSack'', the titular alien is four hundred thousand years old, and has been the LastOfItsKind for ten thousand of these.* In John Maddox Roberts' science fiction novel ''Space Angel'', the crew of the eponymous starship encounter a being that lost a battle with another of it's kind and wrapped itself in rock to hibernate and regenerate. By the time the ''Space Angel's'' crew find it, that rock had evolved into an Earth-like planet, complete with a fully-functioning ecosystem. Although never explicitly stated, it is implied that the being had existed since very near the beginning of the universe.* ''Literature/{{Domina}}'': When asked how old she is, Silk says she is older than every single living human combined, which totals up to two ''trillion'' years. She then laughs, claiming to be ''far'' older than that. [[spoiler:It's implied that this number includes [[HiveMind all her bodies added together]], so by a straight timeline she's likely significantly younger]].

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]* ''[[Series/BabylonFive Babylon 5]]'': Lorien and most, if not all, First Ones encapsulate this trope. Lorien most embodies it, however; he was the first sentient being...ever (in the Milky Way, at least).* In the ''Series/BeingHumanUK'' episode "The War Child", Mr. Snow, the leader of the Old Ones, is old enough that every vampire currently undead descends from him. His actual age is never given, but he claims to have visited Egypt while it was ruled by the pharaohs and once "met the son of a carpenter" (implied to be Jesus Christ).* Various beings in ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' and its spin-off ''Series/{{Angel}}''. There are demons who have been plotting and working towards various ends since before recorded history. One example is the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart of Wolfram and Hart. Minor demons during the time of [[LivingRelic Illyria]], they have spent the intervening millennia developing a deep control over the mortal and hellish dimensions.* ''Series/TheDailyShow'' and ''Series/TheColbertReport'' both liked to jokingly identify [[AcceptablePoliticalTargets John McCain]] as an unbelievably ancient entity -- someone who has walked with Jesus, done cave paintings, and crawled out of the primordial seas. {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d with the joke that "The only thing older than jokes about John [=McCain's=] age is... ''John [=McCain=]''. " And yet, according to his wife Cindy [=McCain=] (via an Onion video) "He's not nearly so old as the Ancient Ones. His outer shell has not even yet calcified."* Several British satirical current affairs shows like ''Series/MockTheWeek'', ''Series/HaveIGotNewsForYou'' and ''Series/TheNewsQuiz'' made age jokes about Sir Menzies Campbell, especially during 2006-2007 when he was leader of the Liberal Democrats. Another target of this is Creator/BruceForsyth, whose age has been estimated by panellists on ''Mock the Week'' and ''Series/{{QI}}'' ranging from a few thousand to several BILLION years.* ''Series/DoctorWho''** The Face of Boe lives to be more than 5 billion years old.** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E8TheImpossiblePlanet The Beast]] claims to be from before time, and even if that isn't true he is still so old that his language predates the Time Lords.** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E3PyramidsOfMars Sutekh]] was imprisoned thousands of years ago, the war [[AncientAstronauts inspiring Egyptian mythology]], and was active for thousands of years before that.** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS15E3ImageOfTheFendahl The Fendahl]] might not qualify, considering that it has technically been ''dead'' for 12 million years.** Jack Harkness, being immortal and effectively indestructible, is headed for this at some point. Assuming the line about him becoming the Face of Boe wasn't just a joke, he has a good few billion years left before running OutOfContinues. He's currently over 2000 years old, having been BuriedAlive for two millennia under Roman Cardiff.** While the Doctor technically doesn't qualify, being only 2000ish as of the Twelfth Doctor ([[UnreliableExpositor he says]]), he is often ''portrayed'' in this manner. His travels have allowed him to be there for a great deal of the history of many cultures, and after [[LastOfHisKind the loss of his own people]], a lifetime of [[SadisticChoice agonizing choices between "horrible" and "more horrible"]], and seeing the cruelty of many to others, he ''feels'' old and tired. He's seen the heat death of the universe, and the first written words of all time were written to him. He's lived much ''more'' than characters who have lived much ''longer''.*** Consider what his age is after ''Hell Bent''; he took the [[TheSlowPath long way around]].*** While the Doctor did spend billions of years making it through his diamond wall in his own personal hell, he was basically just resetting a new version of himself after the last version died. The current Doctor we're seeing, the last of the billion-years cycle, isn't much older than he was before the events of ''Hell Bent''.** The Time Lords are this as a culture. While merely long-lived as individuals, the sheer scope of their civilisation's history is staggering. We learn during the course of the series that they are "the oldest civilisation", have had "ten million years of absolute power", and "a billion years of history". They "practically invented" black holes and mastered teleportation "when the universe was less than half its present size". Their history is so long and filled with so many dubious events that even most modern Time Lords are not aware of much of it, and genuine historical events and artifacts are considered mere myths and legends even amongst themselves.** The [[EldritchAbomination Weeping Angels]] are so ancient, even the Doctor doesn't have a clue what they are or where they come from. Even the Time Lords call them "the Weeping Angels ''of old''".** The Racnoss Empress fled and hid almost five billion years ago, and her ship is the core of planet Earth. No, the ship isn't hidden in the core; it is ''the actual, original core'', around which the planet formed.** The Great Vampires fought against the Time Lords during the early years of the universe, and the only known survivor hid in exo-space (albeit mostly dead) since then.** When [[GeniusLoci House]] in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E4TheDoctorsWife "The Doctor's Wife"]] [[spoiler:hijacks the TARDIS]] and goes adventuring, it casually mentions that it "should have done this half a million years ago."** Ashildr/Me takes TheSlowPath from Viking Scandinavia all the way to the ''final moments of the Universe'', but only has a Human-sized memory, leading to an extreme case of TheFogOfAges. What makes this even more impressive is that she's Ageless, but not Invulnerable - and yet she outlives all other Immortals "brilliantly". Before the total collapse of everything, she is picked up by the Doctor and sets off to have her own adventures in space and time, during which she will truly have no equals. * The Artifact in ''{{Series/Eureka}}'' is dated to the ''previous'' universe. How they have managed to date something that is older than matter itself is unclear. Of course, [[ScienceMarchesOn considering that the theory of continuing Big Bangs and Big Crunches (i.e. the universe collapsing and re-expanding every so often) has been disproven by new evidence, this may no longer be the case.]]* Methos in ''[[Series/{{Highlander}} Highlander: The Series]]'' is at least 5,000 years old. He may actually be much older than that as he claims [[TheFogOfAges to not really remember]] the time before he took his first head, which was about 5,000 years ago. His ancientness is somehow even more disorienting because he seems like such a normal guy. He is also one of the four immortals who inspired the "[[HorsemenOfTheApocalypse Four Horsemen]]" myth (Methos was ''[[RetiredMonster Death]]''). The episode where this is revealed shows that the other three are also still alive (until the end of the episode, that is).* ''Series/MrYoung'': Mrs. Byrne is so old, she misses the days before the Sun existed.* ''Franchise/StargateVerse''** Merlin/Myrddin in ''Series/StargateSG1''. Lived some 10,000 years ago, then [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence "ascended" into an energy being]], only to take back human form millennia later, living amidst humans, then going for suspended animation and sleeping there for a few hundred years more. When he transfers his memories to Daniel Jackson, Daniel notes that "he wasn't kidding about having lived many lifetimes".** A lot of aliens in the series are extremely long lived. Many of the Goa'uld System Lords such as Ra and Apophis were running galaxy wide empires at least 5000 years ago, Asgard such as Thor and Loki inspired the idea for the Norse gods and live on through cloning and mind transfers, the original Replicators from the Pegasus galaxy were built to fight the Wraith over 10,000 years ago, many of those Wraith are also still around due to their own regenerative abilities, and many of the Ancients, notably the ones who Ascended have been around for 10,000 years minimum. In fact, a lot of Ancient technology also counts, including Atlantis, which is at least 1 million years old. The Stargates and Destiny are even older.** Thanks to the cancellation of ''Series/StargateUniverse'', we'll never know what Rush meant when he said that the ''Destiny'''s mission involves finding a structure as old as the Universe itself.* ''Franchise/StarTrek''** The Immortal Flint from the ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode, ''[[http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Requiem_for_Methuselah_%28episode%29 Requiem For Methuselah]]''.*** In the episode ''Let That Be Your Last Battlefield'', Bele claims to have been chasing the political "criminal" Lokai for ''50,000 years''. He later discovers that in his absence, his people have annihilated each other in a genocidal race war.*** The Guardian of Forever, from "The City on the Edge of Forever." The reason it can serve as a PortalToThePast is because it was physically there for ''everything''.** The Borg Collective is once described as "thousands of centuries" old. ** The disembodied mind Sargon has existed for at least 500,000 years. ** The Q Continuum are a race of bodiless {{Energy Being|s}} creatures that evolved from a mortal race that existed shortly after the formation of the universe; some of the oldest members of the Q race are noted to be upwards of 10 billion years old or more. The principal Q with the most screen time in the series (portrayed by John De Lancie) that has a rivalry with Captain Picard, notes offhand that he had a romance with another Q that has been "on again and off again" for 5 billion years; making him at least that old, if not more so[[note]]though that particular Q is a ''notoriously'' UnreliableNarrator[[/note]]. * ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'':** [[TheGrimReaper Death]]. With massive amounts of terror, UncannyValley, CrypticConversation, and all other manner of unsettling tropes. In his few appearances he has explained several times that he will persist throughout eternity, and is the only thing that could truly never die. He also claims that he's destined to be the one to eventually reap God as well.--->'''Death:''' This is one little planet, in one tiny system, in a galaxy that's barely out of its diapers. ''I'm old,'' Dean. ''Very old.'' So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.\\'''Dean:''' I gotta ask, how old are you?\\'''Death:''' As old as God. Maybe older. Neither of us can remember anymore. Life, Death, chicken, egg.** Angels are no slouches either. Castiel (one of the less important angels) remembers when the first fish crawled its way onto land. One of his older brothers, the ArchangelMichael, told him not to step on it. "Big plans for that fish." Even more so for the Archangels, recently being revealed to predate the universe itself.** The Leviathans were apparently one of God's first creations.** The Darkness is so old she has no idea who Death is, since she was [[SealedEvilInACan sealed away]] before Death existed as a concept. It turns out that she and God are "siblings", the first beings to ever exist.** [[spoiler: The Nameless Entity that rules the void known only as the Empty is implied to be the oldest of them all, as he predates The Darkness, God, Death and Creation, as he was the original nonexistence before everything.]]* PlayedForLaughs in ''Series/WizardsOfWaverlyPlace''. Juliet is a vampire who is over 9500 years old, and Prof. Crumbs, the headmaster of Wiztech, considers it a compliment when Alex says he doesn't look a day over 800, and was an adult when the wheel was invented, making him nearly as old as Juliet.* Prince of Fire in ''Series/{{Lexx}}'' claims to have existed since the beginning of time. Which makes sense, since he's essentially {{Satan}}.* In ''Franchise/PowerRangers'', aliens and other nonhumans tend to be longlived. The backstory of most series was either 10,000 years ago (MMPR, Jungle Fury) or 3,000 years ago (Lost Galaxy, Wild Force) and pretty much any major player outside the teenagers with attitudes will have been there for round one. And of course, being ''around'' thousands of years ago doesn't mean you are ''only'' that old. Zordon, the original mentor, is especially portrayed as being just so ancient he knows everything you could possibly need to know. However, the character who ''truly'' takes the (planet-sized birthday) cake is ''Series/PowerRangersOperationOverdrive'''s Sentinel Knight. The five {{Plot Coupon}}s are scattered across the world because the continents were ''one'' when he placed them on Earth. That places PROO's backstory over ''250 million years ago.'' The villains were a SealedEvilInACan case, so not even Sentinel's oldest enemies qualify - they slept through all that time while he has been active.* While even "young" vampires in ''Series/TrueBlood'' are generally old by human standards, only a handful reach the ages required to qualify as a time abyss. From what we see of the handful who do, though [[spoiler: including Russell Edgington on the low end, along with Warlow and Lilith as more dramatic examples]], that's probably a very good thing.* Gen from ''Series/TheGoodPlace''. Her name is short for "Hydrogen", because that was the only thing that existed when she was created.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Music]]* This [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIbIHxKh9bk music video of Barber's Adagio for Strings]] uses this trope by focusing on a tree while human buildings fade in and out around it.* [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkh7xMZyY0s Time Forgotten One]] by Music/{{vocaloid}} KAITO. It takes a bit of thinking to realize [[spoiler: he's just a statue]]* "Farewell..." by Dreamtale.* Most likely Universe Man from the Music/TheyMightBeGiants song [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNT8SMlqLJA "Particle Man"]] represents this trope seeing as he has a watch with a minute hand, millennium hand and an eon hand.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Radio]]* Nicholas Parsons is regularly claimed to be as old as time by panelists on ''Radio/JustAMinute'' and other [[Creator/TheBBC BBC]] Radio 4 programmes. On ''Radio/TheUnbelievableTruth'', someone claimed that there could be a parrot that was older than him, to which Creator/{{David Mitchell|Actor}} replied "Nicholas Parsons has always...''been''."[[/folder]]

[[folder:Religion and Mythology]]* According to most major monotheistic religions in the world today, {{God}} is not technically one of these, because age is a foreign concept; time can only be an abyss to those that are bound by it. God wasn't created or born like humans are, He didn't '''have''' a beginning, He IS the beginning, everything is here because of Him therefore making [[InvertedTrope Him the abyss rather than time]]. Titles like Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the one who was (existed since the beginning), who is (presently is), and who is yet to come (always will exist), the Great I Am are richly deserved.** According to some philosophers, time itself is meaningless to God. He created time, [[BuffySpeak and existed before... He existed when...]] well, [[MindScrew explaining it is hard]], though in one analogy God is like the author of a book. At what point does an author exist in his book's - his universe's - internal timeline? He can turn to the first page, or to the last page. He can write scenes out of order, go back and forth, and generally follow no continuity or causality.--->"With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."---->-- 2 Peter 3:8, NIV translation* In Myth/HinduMythology, reality and everything within it lasts as long as the lifetime of Brahma the creator. Brahma will live to be a hundred years old, except that a single ''day'' in his life is over four billion human years.** Assuming he lived even so much as a hundred "days" Brahma would have by then lived for over 400 billion years. To put that in perspective, it's currently believed that the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. If we get into the years the number goes into astronomical proportions longer than the predicated life span of the universe. Entire universes could die and be reborn many times over before Brahma ever even reached "middle age", such concepts as "time" and "space" might very well collapse and become meaningless terms as the wear and tear of the eons go on. *** The Shiva Purana states that Vishnu ages one day in the time that it takes Brahma to grow old and die, and that Shiva, in turn, ages one day in the time that it takes Vishnu to grow old and die.* Depending on religion and whether any given denomination thereof believes in and/or counts the afterlife a person's spirit may live as long as the respective deity would, given a belief in a spirit's eternal qualities.* [[PhysicalGod Father]] [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Time]].[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tabletop Games]]* Semyon Nikolaev, TheArchmage and a TricksterMentor Extraordinaire from ''TabletopGame/AgeOfAquarius''. We do not learn ''what exactly'' he is, presumably some kind of spirit that is permanently embodied, but his age is stated by WordOfGod to be 14000 or 15000 years.* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons''** Dragons are very much like this. They have about ten age categories, from wyrmling to great wyrm, which takes over a thousand years. ''Then'' they're just about fully grown and live a few more thousand years before old age ''starts to set in''. And some of them can become truly immortal.*** Time Dragons, the most powerful of the epic dragons, are truly immortal. Able to travel in time at will, a Time Dragon could be tens of thousands of years old or ten minutes old, and still be a Great Wyrm in both cases thanks to how their age is tied to the time stream. They keep their lairs in places unimaginably distant in space and time, and rarely bother to even interact with gods.** All [[EldritchAbomination Aboleths]] have [[GeneticMemory genetic eidetic memory]] going back to before the dawn of the gods; they reproduce asexually and inherit the memories of their progenitor. Since they can live indefinitely, it is possible that there are ones still alive that were around before the ''creation of the current universe'' (and yes, their race really is that old).** Most every planar ruler qualifies, guys like archdevils, demon lords, the Hebdomad, and the like. Such beings are immortal unless they are killed (which rarely happens, given how powerful they are) and some can trace their roots back eons, some to a time before mortals existed. And then there are beings like the Obyriths, the Baernaloths, and Zargon the Returner who ruled their respective planes before the current rulers took over.* ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}''** The Celestial Exalted themselves live for a long time, but only one of the currently existing crop actually meets the 5,000-year minimum age requirement for this trope: [[BadassGrandpa Chejop Kejak]], head of the Bronze Faction of Sidereals. He has the distinction of having been born at the very start of the First Age, making him literally as old as ''history itself'' (anything that happened before the First Age is per definition pre-historic). These Celestial Exalted, however, are merely superlongevic demigods. The more powerful of the gods themselves are older still, having been made early in the process of the Creation of the universe, making them as old as the concepts they govern.** The Primordials, and the various beings that were once Primordials (the Yozis and the Neverborn), who pre-date Creation and all of the concepts that make it up, since they're the ones who, well, Created everything. Among the Primordials, Oramus pre-dates even his own existence; to be more precise, he is the proto-type and represents the ''possibility of the existence'' of the Primordials, having known of himself and his siblings when they were merely dreams of their true selves. When Cytherea, the Divine Ignition, gave birth to herself and her Primordial siblings (arguably the first true event in the Exalted chronology), Oramus came into being and said, "''I was waiting for you to awaken. I thought it should never happen.''"* ''TabletopGame/{{Numenera}}'':** The game is set about one billion years into the future. The main feature of the game are artifacts from earlier periods, collectively called numenera, which are based on technology that is like magic to the contemporary people, whose knowledge of history reaches back only for the last thousand years. Given how far in the setting's past the civilizations responsible for the technology rose and fell, the titular numenera can be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, many likely predating the formation of the setting's single supercontinent.** More specifically, the intelligent octopi who live in the oceans are an extremely ancient species, old enough to have seen at least some of the great ancient civilizations rise, flourish and either die out or leave. This is part of the reason they do not interact much with other species -- from their perspective, none ever last long enough for any meaningful interaction to occur. This also applies to individual octopi; they managed to make themselves ageless long in the past, and many octopi are thus very old indeed; their current queen, for instance, is over a million years old.* The TabletopGame/NewWorldOfDarkness: [[TabletopGame/WerewolfTheForsaken Certain spirits]] claim to have been spawned before recorded history, while a handful of [[TabletopGame/MageTheAwakening Abyssal demons]] go back as far as Atlantis. Whether [[TabletopGame/BeastThePrimordial the Dark Mother]] was the first explorer of the Primordial Dream, humanity's collective fearscape, or the Dream itself made manifest, her children know instinctively that she still lives. [[TabletopGame/HunterTheVigil The Cheiron Group's]] [[EldritchAbomination Board of Directors]] date back to at least ancient Greece, while [[TabletopGame/VampireTheRequiem the Strix]] were kicking around during ancient Rome ([[ImmortalityImmorality as well as some particularly ancient vampires]], some of whom could conceivably stretch back further). [[TabletopGame/PrometheanTheCreated Osiris]] has been hinted as still being around; if true, this would make him the single oldest living creature on the planet (inasmuch as Prometheans are alive). [[TabletopGame/ChangelingTheLost The Fae]] [[TheFairFolk have been screwing with people]] for all of recorded history, and since the realms of [[TabletopGame/GeistTheSinEaters the Kerberoi]] are largely immune to the ravages of time, it's practically impossible to know how old they are (prevailing wisdom is that they are all innumerably ancient). [[TabletopGame/MummyTheCurse The Judges of Duat, Anpu and Ammut]] have been around at least since the time of Irem, almost six thousand years ago. It's conceivable, if improbable, that a mummy might have been active for the majority of that time as well. And [[TabletopGame/DemonTheDescent the God-Machine]] may have brought human civilization and technology into being just so that it would have a means to modify its own processes and boost its Infrastructure. * TabletopGame/OldWorldOfDarkness** The Antediluvians of ''TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade''--so named because they were the only vampires who survived the Biblical Flood. They aren't so much vampires as they are [[PhysicalGod undead gods]] by the time of the modern age, and they can do truly mindbending things with their power. The Gangrel Antediluvian, for example, apparently earthmelded with the ''entire planet'', and slowly sank deeper as time went on, gently rocked in her slumber by the Earth's core.*** Elimilech, a 4th generation Malkavian ''antitribu'' and Seraph of the Black Hand, whose embrace date was given as [[Literature/TheBible Ruth, 1:3]]. Because he's supposedly the husband of the Biblical Ruth, whose death is mentioned in that verse.** The Triad of ''TabletopGame/WerewolfTheApocalypse'', the Wyld, the Weaver and the Wyrm, are also this, being the physical manifestations of Chaos/Dynamism, Order/Stasis and Entropy/Destruction, respectively. In fact, the Wyrm actually spawned beings who are ''personifications of its thoughts and feelings'', children by its standards, that are still old as time itself.** The supplement ''Gehenna'' features an optional character that fits the trope even better than the traditional Antediluvians. A 3rd Generation vampire who serves Lilith, and is suggested to be the true clan founder of the Brujah, manages to escape being diablerized by displacing himself from time. However, something goes wrong and he is sent on the [[TheSlowPath extremely slow path]] back to the present, living and being fully aware of over 100,000 years passing.** The Elohim (an umbrella term for both angels and demons, though [[HaveYouSeenMyGod only the Fallen are present for the Time of Judgement]]) from ''TabletopGame/DemonTheFallen'' may be the true Time Abysses of the oWoD: they have been around since the dawn of time and one of their Houses was in charge of creating time in the first place. You'd think that the endless years spent inside the Abyss, the absolutely empty prison of the Fallen, would count as suspended animation of sorts, but no: part of their punishment by God was that they remain ''fully aware'' of the void of the Abyss and of their own utter impotence until the end of time. No wonder they hold a grudge against the Big One Upstairs.* ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' has more than a few. Immortal Elves such as Harlequin all qualify, having been born in the Fourth World of TabletopGame/{{Earthdawn}}, and lived through all five thousand years of the Fifth World to reach the Sixth, which began in 2012. All Great Dragons were born in the ''Second'' World - the Age of Dragons - which was separated from the Fourth by ''another'' five thousand year gap.* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' contains quite a few examples between the various [[OurElvesAreDifferent elves]], [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame dwarves]] and [[OurDemonsAreDifferent daemons]]. The most notable are certainly the Slann, all of whom have been alive since WELL before the Coming of Chaos, an event which occurred over 7,000 years ago. Granted some of these have been in a near-comatose state of meditation since Chaos arrived, but not all have and some of the ones that haven't can rightly claim they were alive before Man existed. Nagash, the First Necromancer, could also possibly claim to be over 5000 years old depending on how you count all his accumulated time dead.** Although daemons don't really count because nobody knows how old they are, no Dwarf (except maybe the Ancestor Gods -- Grimnir for certain, possibly Grungni and Valaya -- and the White Dwarf -- who lived more than a thousand years as Snorri Whitebeard, died, and has been popping up ever since) ever lived even close to 5,000 years, and among the Elves it's basically just Malekith, Morathi, Hellebore, and a few others among the Druchii who used dark sorcery to prolong their lives. Better examples would be some of the dragons, dragon ogres, and treemen, who are the only races that live that long; the first vampires (Who are only a little younger than Nagash); and almost all of the Tomb Kings, although they spend the majority of their time dormant.* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'':** Almost all Eldar live to be at least a thousand years old or so, and some live well over ten thousand (such as Eldrad, who was already a powerful psyker back in the early years of the Imperium), while the Phoenix Lords were around long enough to found ancient schools of war. Dark Eldar meanwhile are made of ImmortalityImmorality, and on average are even older than most Eldar. Their ''de facto'' ruler, Asdrubael Vect, is old enough to have seen the Fall of the Eldar and to remember a time before the Chaos God Slaanesh existed, making him the oldest unambiguously, continuously living thing in the setting, Necrons and the near-dead God-Emperor aside. [[UnreliableNarrator Or so he claims, at any rate]].** Many [[EvilCounterpart Chaos Space Marines]] are the original Traitor Marines, who rebelled against the Emperor in the Horus Heresy ten thousand years ago. However, they spend most of their time in [[NegativeSpaceWedgie the Eye of Terror]], which due to an overlap with [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace the Warp]] lacks anything resembling a linear time stream and proper causality, so the actual age of any individual is usually a mystery. For example, the two canonically confirmed oldest Space Marines are Kharn the Betrayer and Ahzek Ahriman, both being born during the Unification Wars on Terra, this means they're ''both'' over 10,000 years old.** The Immortal GodEmperor of Mankind is approximately 50,000 years old, if his backstory is accurate, although he's spent ten thousand of them on life support.** The Necrons fought and ultimately lost a war for control of the galaxy long before the dinosaurs died on Terra. While most of them where asleep for their sixty million+ years of self-inflicted [[SealedEvilInACan sealing]], some like Praetorians, the Flayed Ones and Szarekh the Silent King were awake the entire time.** [[PhysicalGod The C'Tan]], masters of the Necrons, were literally the oldest beings in the universe, being not that much younger than the first stars. ''Were'' being the operative term, considering the Necrons TurnedAgainstTheirMasters and [[DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu shattered them into pieces]].** [[GodOfEvil The Chaos Gods]] are pure beings of the Warp, and thus time is literally and utterly meaningless to them. The Great Game, the perennial war between them fight for dominance of everything, has been going on for eternity and will continue for eternity, with none of them ever emerging the true victor. There's also some TimeyWimeyBall with this, as the Warp was calm and uninhabited for much of the setting's history; Slaanesh for example came into being around the year 30,000 and suddenly he'd always been there, and the Emperor was created by early humanity as a counter to birth of the others.** The Swarmlord of the [[HordeOfAlienLocusts Tyranids]] has been around as long as the Tyranid race has, and has more autonomy than any other Tyranid, likely to the point of having a sort of consciousness of its own. Considering that they have attacked the Milky Way from multiple directions, it would follow that they are attacking from different galaxies, and as such have stripped multiple galaxies of all biological matter. Such a process would take eons, making the Swarmlord incredibly old. Seeing as the Swarmlord [[ResurrectiveImmortality is reborn with all of its experiences, memories, and character whenever it is killed]], it will continue to exist for as long as the Tyranid race does.* ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'': Both Nicol Bolas and Ugin are Elder Dragons. Ugin is described as unfathomably ancient, and Nicol Bolas is said to be over 25,000 years old[[note]]To quote [[GadgeteerGenius Tezzeret]]: "I would have picked an opponent younger than, say, human civilization."[[/note]] . ** The Eldrazi Titans also qualify, being alien gods formed before colored magic even existed. This means that they're older than Nicol Bolas, putting their age in the tens of thousands of years.** Any of the living, active Paruns in Ravnica (A parun being the founder of any of the 10 guilds) counts, given that by the time of the first Ravnica block story, the guilds have been around for 10,000 years. The only survivors are Niv-Mizzet (the MadScientist dragon of Izzet), Rakdos (the demon in charge of his namesake guild), and Mat'Selesnya (the godlike elemental leader of the Selesnya, although unlike the other two they have not been directly seen in card form). [[spoiler:There is actually one more: Azor, the parun of Azorius, but being a planeswalker, he is currently not in Ravnica, but nevertheless alive and well.]]** Ugin's one-time allies Sorin Markov and Nahiri also qualify to a lesser degree. Sorin, a vampire planeswalkers, is about 8000 years old (as they first meet 4000 years ago and she remarks upon escaping the Helvault in modern times that she is now older than he was when they first met). While Nahiri was technically in suspended animation for most of her life she was conscious the entire time and constantly tormented by the legions demons sealed inside with her.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Toys]]* Tren Krom, the resident EldritchAbomination in ''Toys/{{Bionicle}}'', acts this way, what with his "I watched your universe be born" and all. FridgeLogic then kicks in, however, as even though Tren Krom ''is'' the oldest being in the Matoran Universe, that universe is [[spoiler:actually a giant space-traveling robot, constructed many, many millennia ago. Its creators are still alive and has been waiting for its return, which makes them much older than Tren Krom]]. This goes for many other inhabitants both inside and outside the Matoran Universe as well: They are truly ancient by our standards, [[TimeDissonance but their own feeling of age varies vastly.]]** Of course, that means that he's ''only'' 100,000+ years old. * Draculaura, the GenkiGirl VegetarianVampire from ''Toys/MonsterHigh'', reveals in her second diary that her "father" is not only not the Dracula we know,[[note]]The Stoker character was a con-man upstart vampire renting Draculaura's father's castle who decided to steal his identity and use it to terrorize mortals until he met some LaserGuidedKarma.[[/note]] but also was already an ancient vampire "[[UsefulNotes/TheRomanRepublic by the time togas were first becoming fashionable]]." Pretty eerie and ominous stuff for a doll line rated ages 6+.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Video Games]]* The Silver Lady from ''VideoGame/ArcanumOfSteamworksAndMagickObscura'', while considered incomprehensibly ancient even by the oldest of elves and dwarves, probably falls short of required minimum age by about a thousand years or so. Nashrudin, on the other hand, was considered to be the oldest living being at the time when a certain annoying Silver child was interrupting his works [[spoiler:and he is still around at the time the game takes place.]]* The Demi-Gods of ''VideoGame/AsurasWrath'' are an entire race of these. 12,000 years old is basically a few ''months'' as far as aging is concerned, and there have been at least 127 emperors, all really old themselves, making the civilization even older then thought. [[spoiler:Chakravartin is at least as old as the universe, and it is implied that this isn't the first he's created.]]* ''VideoGame/BlazBlue''** [[ElegantGothicLolita Rachel Alucard]] started as "merely" ReallySevenHundredYearsOld. Put together the JigsawPlot, though, and it's revealed that [[spoiler:she's lived through, [[RippleEffectProofMemory and remembers]], every [[GroundhogDayLoop possible iteration]] of both Arcade Mode and Story Mode, with a full century passing between each.]] That puts her age at over 72,500 years. No wonder she seems [[DeadpanSnarker bored]].** [[CardCarryingVillain Hazama]]/[[OurGhostsAreDifferent Yuuki Terumi]], the BigBad {{Troll}}, who has [[spoiler:lived though ''even more'' time loops than Rachel]]. It's even heavily implied that the Time Abyss he's been put through is the reason behind his [[AxCrazy batshit]] [[LaughingMad insane]] [[OmnicidalManiac behavior]]; after the millionth or so loop he just couldn't take it anymore, snapped, and set out to put an end to the loops, once and for all. ''Central Fiction'' finally gives a full idea of just how old he really is, [[spoiler:and he's probably as old (or pretty damn close to) as the BlazBlue universe itself since he's the original will of the Susanooh Unit meant to protect the Master Unit Amaterasu]].---> '''Hazama''': How many years... How many years? Oh, how many years I've waited. [[GroundhogDayLoop How many times has this been repeated?]] How many ''hundreds'' of times?! How many ''THOUSANDS''?! '''[[SerialEscalation ONE HUNDRED THOUSANDS?! MILLIONS?!]]''' '''''[[UpToEleven TRILLIONS?!]]''''' I've repeated this worthless comedy show more times than I can '''count'''! Hmhmhmhm... Yes... Just a little bit more... Just a bit more, and it will be within reach - the lost [[XblazeCodeEmbryo "Embryo"]]. Once that's done, this shitty, worthless comedy show will end. [[ToCreateAPlaygroundForEvil Hatred will beget more hatred. War will beget more war. The party will turn to heavenly disaster, and all of the dead souls will be invited to the Doomsday!]] And then...a new [[ArtifactOfDoom "BlazBlue"]] will be born.* ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger''** Lavos, whose life cycle was over 65 million years long, and that's only counting the amount of time since it landed. There's no telling how long it spent on its birth planet or how long it drifted through space before landing on ours.** Queen Zeal probably also qualifies, at least in any time period other than her native one. By the time Lavos is due to rise, the Queen is 14,000 years old; she's probably gone more than a wee bit crazy from spending millennia locked up inside [[TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon the Black Omen]] with--from the look of things--absolutely no one else to talk to. Note further that she had indeed achieved the immortality she sought; had the Lavos timeline played out, she would have eventually been the very last human--indeed, the very last [[LastOfHisKind ANYTHING]] on that world.** ''VideoGame/ChronoCross'' shows that Lavos can live in the TimeCrash. Every time Chrono or Serge defeat Lavos, it just retreats there, picks a different timestream where it didn't die, and returns. How long has it spent in the Darkness Beyond Time, learning history from different time streams?** It turns out that the Nu are also this, as in the DS remake one can be fought in the prehistoric era and shows up for round two in the Dark Ages.** Which also explains why Spekkio's strongest form is a red Nu. "The stronger you are, the stronger I look", to paraphrase. He too is probably an example as he's the embodiment of magic... possibly.** Spekkio lives in "The End of Time", some sort of vaguely-explained dimension that exists outside of time. So how old he is would be a matter of perspective. To him, time probably doesn't have much meaning.* In ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}}'', the player is this. They take control over a civilization back in the Neolithic and observes millennia of its history during their rule.* [[spoiler:Kane]] of ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquer'' is revealed to be on earth since the dawn of humankind at least, [[ManipulativeBastard guiding]] mankind from cavemen to where they are at the end of ''Tiberium Twilight''.* ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls''** From the series primary CreationMyth come Anu and Padomay, the [[AnthropomorphicPersonification anthropomorphized]] primordial forces of [[OrderVersusChaos "stasis/order/light" and "change/chaos/darkness"]], respectively. Their interplay in the great "void" of pre-creation led to creation itself. It is from their [[PiecesOfGod spilled and intermingled blood]] that the et'Ada would emerge.** All of the [[OurGodsAreDifferent et'Ada]], pre-creation spirits, qualify. Depending on their actions during creation, they would come to be known as either Aedra ("our ancestors" in the [[ClassicalTongue old Aldmeris language]]) or the Daedra ("not our ancestors"). All have existed since before linear time was even conceived of as a concept. Of them, Akatosh, the [[TopGod Chief Deity]] of the "[[SaintlyChurch Nine Divines]]" pantheon, was said to have been the first to manifest out of the raw energy of the universe. Perhaps fittingly, he governs over ''time'' itself. The [[TimeOfMyths Dawn Era]] came to an end when he and the other pre-creation spirits settled into their roles, with Akatosh specifically creating linear time as a concept.*** This also includes the lesser et'Ada, such as the [[OurDemonsAreDifferent lesser Daedra]] and the [[OurDragonsAreDifferent dragons]], who are [[DragonsAreDivine divine]] [[OurAngelsAreDifferent lesser Aedra]]. There is no definitive answer regarding the origin of dragons other than that they [[MonsterProgenitor come from Akatosh]]. A Dremora, a member of a lesser Daedra species, upon being questioned simply answered that dragons "just were, and are," with no definitive beginning. The very concepts of mortality, being finite, and being temporary are so alien to dragons that these words, [[LanguageOfMagic spoken in draconic]], were used against them in a mortal-created [[MakeMeWannaShout Thu'um shout]] which temporarily ''[[BrownNote cripples]]'' dragons. ** The Hist are a race of ancient, [[WiseTree sentient]], and possibly {{omniscient}} trees native to the Black Marsh where they are worshiped by the [[LizardFolk Argonians]]. They are said to be the oldest beings on Tamriel, older than any Man or [[OurElvesAreBetter Mer]], and were around to see the wars of the [[{{Precursors}} Ehlnofey]] during the Dawn Era, before linear time had even been conceived of as a concept. According to ''The Annotated Anuad'', the Hist were originally from one of the 12 "worlds of Creation," which were destroyed by [[TheAntiGod Padomay]], the embodiment of change, and reassembled into Nirn by [[GodOfGods Anu]], the embodiment of stasis. This would make the Hist literally ''older than the world itself''. ** The eponymous [[TomeOfEldritchLore Elder Scrolls]] themselves, referred to as "fragments of creation", are a history of all time - what was, what might be, what will be, what ''could have been'' - written in a complex, mind-searing form. Also, while each Scroll is a definite object, any scroll that a sentient mind isn't keeping track of may or may not exist.** The [[OurDwarvesAreDifferent Dwemer]] as a race, but likely not the individual Dwemer themselves (though with [[RealityWarper their abilities]], it isn't out of the realm of possibility). It is said that, during the [[TimeOfMyths Dawn Era]] (an era before linear time existed while the mortal plane was still settling post-creation), they studied the "death of the Earth Bones", essentially the laws of nature and physics, to find ways to [[LoopholeAbuse manipulate them]]. ** In ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion]]'''s ''Shivering Isles'' expansion, you meet Dyus, keeper of all the knowledge Jyggalag's library held (which knew all the actions of all beings divine, mortal, and creature) prior to being being made immortal and imprisoned by [[MadGod Sheogorath]] when he destroyed the library. It's unknown how long he's been imprisoned, but given that [[spoiler:Sheogorath ''was'' Jyggalag before being cursed by the other Daedra]], it's probably a good bet it's been a few thousand years.** Gelebor and Vyrthur from the ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]'' DLC ''Dawnguard'' are the last two original, uncorrupted Snow Elves from the time of the war between their race and the immigrant Atmorans (who, in time, would become the Nords). The reason for Gelebor's longevity is presumably a special blessing from Auri-El (the Elven name for Akatosh), and Vyrthur is a vampire, one of the first in Nirn that wasn't directly converted by [[GodOfEvil Molag Bal]].* Akron, the final boss of ''VideoGame/EpicBattleFantasy 3'', muses on this in his BossBanter. He has lived for ''billions'' of years and no longer even remembers when or how he came into being. He remarks that he has been defeated, weakened, and imprisoned countless times, but ultimately, he endures while his enemies fall to the ravages of time.* The four Ancients from ''VideoGame/EternalDarkness'' are all millennia old at the ''least''.* ''VideoGame/{{Fable}}''.** Jack of Blades is one of three demon-like creatures from the Void and was old before the world was made.** Scythe is hinted to be the original Archon, William Black, who lived in the time when mankind was young and forged the Sword of Aeons and ruled the Old Kingdom for millennia, and it still alive millennia after it fell.* The Creator from ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIVTheAfterYears'' is implied to be several thousand, if not several million, years old. Old enough to conduct biology experiments on a ''macroevolutionary'' timescale.* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII''** Jenova crashed on the Planet some thousands of years ago. It saw/caused the extinction of an entire sentient race. It's implied life cycle is similar to Lavos from ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'', as described earlier: going from planet to planet, wiping out all life, absorbing all the souls on the planet, and then moving on to a new world to absorb (with god knows how long spent in space in between).** The [=WEAPONs=], on a smaller scale. They were created when Jenova landed, and are biological weapons that protect the Planet's consciousness from any threat.* Garland from ''Videogame/FinalFantasyIX'' is at the very least 5000 years old, having started the process of [[spoiler:assimilating the player's world of Gaia with his world of Terra that long ago through a ridiculously complex procedure too nonsensical to fully explain here]], but it's never stated how long he lived before that. Ancient structures he built on Gaia can be explored as dungeons filled with LostTechnology. He's watched the growth of all the major civilizations on the planet. For example, he ''built'' the massive Iifa Tree and is responsible for the natural phenomenon called "Mist".* The [[EldritchAbomination fal'Cie]] from ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII'' have been around for thousands, if not ''millions'' of years, and it's very possible that the vast majority of them will live eternally until they are killed. [[spoiler:No wonder they all want to die.]]* The [[EldritchAbomination Elder]] [[OurDragonsAreDifferent Dragons]] from ''VideoGame/GuildWars2'' are stated to awaken about every ten-thousand years, with heavy implications that this is not even the second or third time they've awakened, drastically changing how old the world is. And on a smaller note, the [[PhysicalGod human gods]] and [[OurDemonsAreDifferent titans]] may also qualify.* ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'':** The two monitors we see in the original trilogy, 343 Guilty Spark and 2401 Penitent Tangent, were both built around the same time as the Halo rings themselves, which was over 100,000 years ago. Penitent Tangent was captured, and we don't see much of him, but we clearly see that the years have turned Guilty Spark into a narcissistic nutcase. Mendicant Bias, another AI made by the Forerunners, betrayed its masters and sided with the Flood, much to its remorse; by the time the games takes place 100,000 years later, it is broken and fragmented, only appearing in certain terminals the player can activate and read in ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}''.** [[EldritchAbomination The Gravemind]]. It was around long before any of the above-mentioned [=AIs=], and fought against the original [[{{Precursors}} Forerunners]]. ''Literature/TheForerunnerSaga'' reveals that it's [[spoiler: ''millions'' of years old, since all Graveminds past and present share the same consciousness (that of the Flood HiveMind), with the Primordial Gravemind having been the last Precursor, the race responsible for the existence of humans, Forerunners, and every other sentient race seen so far.]]** The Precursors have been established to be millions of years old, but ''Literature/HaloSilentium'' shattered all expectations: [[spoiler:They have existed for over a ''Hundred. Billion. Years.'' Somehow, they are several times older than this ''universe''.]]** The Didact is 10,000 years old at the time of the Forerunner-Flood War, while his wife, the Librarian, is 11,000 and eternally young. Forerunners as a race usually live to be thousands of years old, thanks to the incredibly useful armor every one of them wears. In fact, their highly advanced interstellar civilization itself managed to thrive for over ten million years.* While many of the more powerful vampires in the ''VideoGame/LegacyOfKain'' series measure their lifespan in millennia, the crowning glory has to go to the [[EldritchAbomination Elder God]] that helpfully resurrects and guides Raziel on his RoaringRampageOfRevenge in the ''Soul Reaver'' branch of the games. Considering that the Vampires and the humans fought for untold thousands of years, then Kain [[TheBadGuyWins won the war]] and destroyed the Pillars of Nosgoth, and then the Vampires ruled for thousands of years ''after'' that before the first Soul Reaver game, it's something of a shock to realize that this tentacle-and-eyeball-laden entity has been guiding souls across the Wheel of Fate to their resurrections and/or final rest for all of it and longer. [[spoiler:Until you find out in ''Defiance'' that [[UnreliableNarrator it was all a big lie]] and he was ''eating'' said souls; he's pissed at the vampires because their souls are delicious but, being quasi-immortal, he can't eat them any more!]]* Sentient A.I. Durandal from ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' plans to survive the collapse of the universe and witness the big bang that creates the '''next''' one. [[spoiler: He lives to the end, but chooses to stay.]]* ''Franchise/MassEffect''** The true age of [[SapientShip the R]][[EldritchAbomination eap]][[AbusivePrecursors ers]] is not known, but even the absolute minimum figures given are staggeringly high. ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'' establishes they are part of a cycle that occurs every 50,000 years, ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' pushes that back to at least 37 ''million'' years (or rather, [[spoiler:the lucky shot that killed a Reaper]] eventually impacted a planet 37 million years ago), and ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' confirms the existence of a Reaper corpse over a '''billion''' years old.** The end of ''Mass Effect 3'' reveals [[spoiler:the Catalyst, an AI housed in the core of the Citadel. It was what masterminded the creation of the Reapers, so it at least as old as the oldest of them, probably more so]].** In the "Control" Ending, [[spoiler:Shepard becomes a Time Abyss. "Eternal. Infinite. Immortal."]]** The Prothean VI Vigil has been around for at least 50,000 years, most of those spent entirely alone. In ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'', [[spoiler:Shepard is informed that Vigil has shut itself down and all attempts to reactivate it have failed.]]** The Thorian saw the rise and fall of the the Protheans more than 50,000 years ago, and is thought to be more than 100,000 years old.** [[spoiler:The Leviathans]] are the best example in the series, being the race that [[spoiler:created the Catalyst.]] It isn't clear if the ones met in the game had personally been around the whole time or not since they use intentionally vague terms.* In ''VideoGame/{{Mother 3}}'', [[spoiler:Porky]] is this, due to having achieved immortality through repeated abuse of TimeTravel. When you meet him, he's bedridden due to his insane age, and utterly bored with all of creation, but underneath that he's still [[PsychopathicManchild the spoiled brat he always was]]. He says that even ''he'' doesn't know how old he is anymore. Might be 1,000 years, might be 10,000. Who knows? [[spoiler: Truly exemplified in the ending, where he traps himself in the Absolutely Safe Capsule. You can't hurt him... Nothing can. [[GoneHorriblyRight Not even age]]. [[AndIMustScream Forever and ever.]] ]]** [[spoiler: And he ''loves it.'']]* ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'''s PlayerCharacter The Nameless One would have become this if only he wasn't cursed to forget everything upon each death. He has been around for millennia but has only the scraps he can recover during the game to prove it. [[ScarsAreForever His scars are another story altogether.]] Incidentally, the person who ''gave'' him that immortality is still around. As is the BigBad, [[spoiler:The Nameless One's mortality, who cannot die while he does and ''does'' remember everything The Nameless One has ever forgotten]].* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}''** Arceus is heavily implied to be the creator of the Pokemon universe, if not at least the God of Pokemon as it is the original Pokemon that came before all others. A special event in ''[=HeartGold=]'' and ''[=SoulSilver=]'', where Arceus offers the player a choice of three legendary Pokemon (Dialga, Palkia, or Giratina), gives a glimpse of the sheer enormousness of what it has lived through.** Dialga, Palkia and Giratina themselves are an example. Dialga's Pokedex entry even states that time itself started to flow when it was born. By extension, the Lake trio (Uxie, Mespirit and Azelf) are also as old.** Mew is believed to be the ancestor of all Pokemon, though this probably doesn't apply to the above.** Wartortle is said to live 10,000 years. Though not as extreme as Arceus, that's still a ''long'' time.** Heatran might also be extremely ancient, as it was apparently born from lava that pooled at around the same time that the earth was first formed.** It is noted in the Pokedex that Rayquaza has lived in the ozone layer for several hundred million years because it gets its energy from water particles and sunlight in the ozone layer, meaning that it doesn't ever need to go down on solid ground to survive. It is for this reason that its existence went into legend as it hardly ever left the sky. For perspective the reign of the dinosaurs was approximately 200 hundred million years on this Earth, Rayquaza is at the very least slightly over 3 times older than the existence of the dinosaurs.** Kyogre and Groudon are mentioned as having produced entire seas and continents. If this is talking about the entire Earth then they are at least 4 billion years old, but if it is talking about the region of Hoenn then it could be at least a few million years. In ''Emerald'' the elders who have the orbs that are said to control Kyogre and Groudon don't ever specifically call those two or even Rayquaza by name, only claiming them to be super-ancient Pokemon, which is putting it lightly.** Xerneas and Yveltal from X and Y are ''at least'' 3000 years old when the GreatOffscreenWar happened. How long they were in existence before that is unknown but they're said to be the embodiments of Life and Death in the Pokéverse.** Genesect's Pokedex entry states that it existed 300 million years ago.* ''VideoGame/PrimalRage'': All of the Virtuous and Destructive Gods are at least a million years old.* Marduk from ''VideoGame/{{Sacrifice}}'' makes the claim of Time Abyss during his final appearance. His innate purpose, apparently, is to destroy all 'unworthy' aspects of creation (and he doesn't seem fussed about collateral damage), which would make him as old as existence itself.* ''VideoGame/SlyCooperThievesInTime'' reveals that [[spoiler:Clockwerk, the BigBad of [[VideoGame/SlyCooperAndTheThieviusRaccoonus the first game]] is ''much'' older than supposedly 3200 years old, having existed during the Ice Age]].* ''VideoGame/SonicUnleashed'' has Dark Gaia and Light Gaia [[spoiler:AKA Chip]] who are the same age as the Earth.* ''VideoGame/StarCraft'':** The Zerg Overmind can legitimately claim to be ancient, but has some demerit points on his Time Abyss license since being killed off. Silly Dark Templar with the ability to kill off parts of the Zerg HiveMind. ([[spoiler:Of course, he got some of those points removed since it was revealed he ''intended'' to die]]).** [[spoiler:Samir Duran]], in ''Brood War'', certainly ''hints'' that he has existed probably as long as the Overmind and possibly longer still.*** In ''Heart of the Swarm'' it turned out that [[spoiler: he is actually an ancient shapeshifter known as Narud who served Amon, the Overmind's creator. ''Legacy of the Void'' shows that he is a [[{{Precursors}} Xel'naga]], and thus older than the universe]].** ''VideoGame/StarcraftIIHeartOfTheSwarm'' introduces the Primal Zerg in general and Zurvan/The Ancient One in particular (Zurvan being older than the Overmind).* Ratatosk and the Centurions in ''VideoGame/TalesOfSymphoniaDawnOfTheNewWorld'' are implied to be somewhere around 10,000 years old (the age of the original WorldTree of which Ratatosk is the spirit).* ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' usually settles with "merely" ReallySevenHundredYearsOld characters, but there are a handful which are truly ancient. Most notable is Eirin, who routinely claims to be infinitely old (relative to everyone else anyway) and was a mentor to some of the gods who took part in the CreationMyth of Japan. Her age is most likely measured in millions of years.** Yuuka Kazami is an implied example as well. She is stated to be one of the most powerful {{youkai}} in Gensoukyou by sheer virtue of being [[StrongerWithAge one of, if not its outright oldest resident]]. In ''Phantasmagoria of Flower View'', several characters are confronted by the local judge of the dead who warns them about the sins that may end up getting them sent to hell once they die. Yuuka's sin is determined to be that she has lived too long... To put that warning into perspective; the only other people who are known to get on the CelestialBureaucracy's bad side for living too long are hermits who have eluded death for approximately ten times their original life expectancy (that's to say, they're pushing their thousands). Youkai, by contrast, are TheAgeless by nature, with a few of them having lived for well over a thousand years without getting into conflict with the Celestial Bureaucracy... No matter how old Yuuka is, she's not just "old", she's ''ancient.''* [[ImplacableMan Asgard the golem]] from ''VideoGame/WildArms3'' gets sent back in time with a extremely simple learning program and comes back via TheSlowPath having developed sentience in the meantime.* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft''** Loken, a Titan-appointed guardian evokes this trope by explaining that he has held watch over Azeroth for countless millennia and seen the rise and fall of civilisations, the birth and extinction of entire species.** Nordrassil, the World Tree, in the ''VideoGame/{{Warcraft}}'' universe is at least ten thousand years old. So are some dragons and various godlike entities. Many night elves are as well, but many of them sleep through it, and the others don't have the gravitas you'd expect.*** Druids don't simply sleep - they watch over the [[TheLifestream Emerald Dream]].** Many Draenei remember their homeworld Argus, from where they fled over 25,000 years ago. Since it's implied that they spent much of their trip through the Nether in suspended animation, their exact age is hard to guess...but it's known that they lived on several worlds before ending up in Azeroth, so it'll still add to a very long time. Velen, their leader, is the only one that really looks old, so it could be that he spent less time in suspended animation, or that he was old even when they lived on Argus. The Lords of the Burning Legion, being originally members of the same race, are the same age too (and they've been active for the whole 25 millennia, too).** Many Titan-constructed facilities can be found around Azeroth. Depending on the source the Titans either created Azeroth or shaped it into a life-supporting planet. In either case, the buildings are tends of thousands of years old at the very least, possibly several million years old. Some are very intact and still guarded by the Titan's constructs.** [[EldritchAbomination The Old Gods]], who supposedly inhabited Azeroth before the Titans came along.** The Dragon Aspects aren't quite as old as the planet, though they aren't far from it. Nozdormu, however, lords over all of time. Until something "happens", he can also see ''every possible route time MIGHT take''. At one point, he became trapped in time ('how long' is hard to say given the nature of the thing). ''Every'' moment of time. At once. Including all the infinite alternate routes. When [[spoiler:Thrall]] finds him, he is awestruck to see his entire life at once played out with a different memory on a different single scale of the dragon's massive form.** [[http://www.wowhead.com/npc=30381/xarantaur#comments Xarantaur the Witness]] definitely fits the spirit of this trope, if not the letter. He was a historian from before the Sundering who, at the moment of his death, was taken up by the Guardians of Time and given immortality so that he might witness (hence the name) and record all of Azerothian history. Among his duties is comparing his own records against the records of society around him, so he'll know if someone has been messing up the timestream (again.)* ''VideoGame/{{Xenogears}}''** Deus is a superweapon that crashed on the planet the game takes place on 10,000 years ago. It's been trying to repair itself ever since, [[spoiler: and created the people of the world to serve as spare parts.]]** Miang serves as Deus' physical avatar, and has been manipulating every civilization since the beginning to serve Deus' needs, although she survives through {{BodySurf}}ing.** Emperor Cain and the Gazel Ministry [[spoiler: were the first humans created after the crash 10,000 years ago. Cain still has his body, but the Ministry [[BrainUploading uploaded their minds into a computer]] centuries ago.]]** [[spoiler: Fei and Elly themselves have been [[ReincarnationRomance continuously reincarnated]] since the crash. Late in the game, Fei finally regains all the memories from his previous lives.]]** And topping all of them is [[spoiler: the Wave Existence. It created the universe. BY ACCIDENT.]]* ''VideoGame/{{Xenosaga}}''** Wilhelm is exactly as old as the universe, as [[spoiler:it is his job to rewind it to the beginning, along with himself, in order to prevent its eventual dissolution. Rather like a cosmic version of a Windows reinstall]]. By contrast, U-DO [[spoiler:is claimed to have 'observed' multiple cycles of Wilhelm+ universe, but being in a different time stream, it's not clear whether it really qualifies as 'older']].** It is implied that chaos [[spoiler:was around during the birth of Christianity, and quite possibly even before that. Xenosaga is a bit over 5000 years into the future]].* The [[spoiler:Supreme God Sol]] for the ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsZ'' saga "[[ResetButton reboots]]" the universe for every 12,000 years. Although the one that appears in the GrandFinale is a mere copy of the original, it's implied the cosmic cycle of destruction and rebirth has occurred at least 10,000 times.* ''VideoGame/DragonballXenoverse'': The Supreme Kai of Time, Tokitoki and The Demon God Demigra all existed 75 million years before the show started.* ''[[VideoGame/{{Contra}} Contra: Hard Corps]]'' has Brad Fang, a [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot cyborg werewolf super soldier with a gun for an arm]] who is apparently over 100 million years old.* Strongly implied to be the case for Rosalina, from ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'' While she's explicitly at least [[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld centuries old]], the ending to ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'' has her reveal that [[spoiler: she's overseen the death and rebirth of the universe many times in the past, meaning she is likely at least tens of billions of years old]].* ''[[Videogame/StarControl Star Control II]]'' has the Slylandro, gasbag aliens who live on a gas giant, both as a race and individually. They're the only ones in the entire game that ever met the Precursors, whose teachings they still use, and the one you personally speak to remembers when the Ur-Quan were still brown, rather than split into green and black, as they used to visit often back then. This split, that also caused both of them to become slavemasters and genocidal (respectively), happened over 20000 years ago.* Aurelion Sol, the Star Forger from ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends'' is ''THE'' oldest being in Runeterra's universe. His lore confirmed as such: '' The being now known as Aurelion Sol was already ancient by the time stellar debris first coalesced into worlds. Born in the first breath of creation, he roamed the vast nothingness, seeking to fill a canvas of incalculable breadth with marvels whose twinkling spectra brought him considerable delight and pride.''* Although the last remaining bud of the planet-wide fungus Mikollopria that fights as a ''VideoGame/{{Battleborn}}'' was spawned in 19,209 C.R., Miko's HiveMind consciousness first gained sentience over a million years before. They are thus in a sense the oldest living being in the entire Battleborn universe having even been sentient during the time of the ancient precursor Aztanti civilization.* Owing to the the fact that ''VideoGame/NierAutomata'' is set 8,545 years after the end of ''VideoGame/NieR'', Devola, Popola and Emil qualify because they're around for the events of both games. [[spoiler:[[NotAsYouKnowThem Somewhat]]. Devola and Popola are not actually the same ones from the first game but they are of the same line and were also overseeing Project Gestalt elsewhere. And Emil is a clone who nonetheless has been fighting the machine lifeforms for as long as he can remember]].* A few Winglies in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfDragoon'' are stated as having been alive during the Dragon Campaign, which ended over 11,000 years ago. Likewise the Divine Dragon and every surviving Virage is from that era as well. Lastly, [[spoiler:Rose]] actually fought in the Dragon Campaign and has been spending the centuries since then hunting down and killing the Moon Child.* ''VideoGame/FateExtra'': The Moon Cell, an unbelievably powerful supercomputer in orbit around Earth (aka the Moon), has apparently existed before the Earth itself had even finished forming. Who built the thing is entirely unknown, though most believe it has to be aliens, since it pre-dates all life on Earth, and even pre-dates the ''gods''.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Comics]]* Sarda (and to a lesser extent, Lich), in ''Webcomic/EightBitTheater''. Sarda was present at the birth of the universe, and [[spoiler:due to the presence of White Mage]] was forced to wait several billion years for planetary formation to give him a reasonably pleasant place to live. By the time of the comic, he is ''quite'' mad (in every sense of the word). Lich notes at one point the shortsightedness of living races by the fact that they "build [their] cities right where glaciers will come screaming through in 200,000 years".* In ''Webcomic/BirdBoy'', [[http://bird-boy.com/ Bali stumbles on evidence of long, long, long ago.]] Mythic time, in fact.* In the ''ComicBook/BuckGodotZapGunForHire'' universe, it's said that the Winslow has existed since the Big Bang, and will continue to exist long after the universe ends. It's also said that there are other objects like the Winslow, leftovers from previous universes that have somehow become eternal and indestructible. The Winslow is special by being the only sentient one, however.* Several members of the cast of ''Webcomic/DanAndMabsFurryAdventures'': Even though most Cubi "only" live about three thousand years, clan leaders live much longer, with Cyra the ''youngest'' at about 7,000, Fa'lina 9,288, and the oldest about 75,000. The Fae and Dragons are even older, with a (now-deleted) secret cast page putting Mab at over 400,000 and the Dragon exemplar from [[AllThereInTheManual the Demonology page]] listed as over 57,000 and said to be "fairly young." To many of these people, [[{{Muggles}} Being]] civilization seems like something of an ephemeral fad. Fa'lina, in particular, seems completely unchanged since a sidestory set in the seventeenth century, in contrast to the much younger Kria, Aaryanna, and Abel; even Mink, whose age is unknown, seems to have become obsessed with 20th-century technology in the interim.* ''Webcomic/GunnerkriggCourt'': It is eventually revealed that [[spoiler:Jones, a.k.a. Wandering Eye,]] has existed, [[spoiler: immortal, indestructible, unchanging]], and mostly alone, for more than [[http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=1113 4.5 billion years.]] [[spoiler:She has wandered the earth ever since its creation. She claims that she isn't even alive, and even she doesn't know what she is]]. [[http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1112 Annie's reaction]] to this revelation is appropriate, all things considered. It also puts a lot more weight on something she said earlier in the comic:-->'''Jones''': I've never seen something like this before.\\'''Court Administrator''': Coming from you, that disturbs me greatly.* ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}''** The First Guardians are described as "nearly as old as their [respective] planets". Becquerel, Jade's pet Guardian, arrived on Earth from a meteor in the Devonian period, ''[[ArcNumber 413]] million years ago''.--->(From ''Homestuck'' Book Two) Long enough ago that a bunch of ocean used to not be there. Oh, and dinosaurs? They hadn't even been BORN yet.** Lord English, who exists outside of time and has lived through every universe, ever.** Age of ghosts, who exist in the [[EldritchLocation Furthest Ring]], can be very difficult to judge, since time as a concept doesn't make a lot of sense out there, and is completely disconnected from the timeline of any individual universe. In any case, [[spoiler: Aranea]] has been dead for so long time has lost meaning to her.* Anything having to do with the dragon or Nemesite civilizations in ''Webcomic/TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob''.-->'''Princess Voluptua:''' "I'm heir to the throne of an empire that has owned your world since your antecedents were fish."* Franchise/{{Cthulhu|Mythos}} in ''Webcomic/IrregularWebcomic'', since he's been sent back to the beginning of time and forced to sit through the first 15 billion years of the universe's development ''[[http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2255.html twice.]]''* When they first appeared in ''Webcomic/{{Mindmistress}}'', the Sisters of Twilight were witnessing the birth of the [[EldritchAbomination Elder]] [[Franchise/CthulhuMythos Gods]]. And they were already really old in those days.* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary''** The Bradicor tend to be... [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2002-03-28 rather long lived]].--->'''Fobottr Tenant:''' Are you claiming that your people have been on the surface for over ten million years?\\'''Rod:''' Oh, my people have been down there for ''much'' longer than ''that''. No, I was just talking about ''me'', personally.** One member of the race, [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2007-07-14 while talking to a human]], notes that he's having some trouble understanding their perspective on mortality (in particular, celebrating the death of an enemy) because he is personally so old that just the 1% margin of error when converting his age between the two calendars is ''older than humanity as a species''.** It [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2007-08-31 was]] [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2007-09-02 said]] that Carbosilicate Amorphs, the species of the titular Schlock, are naturally evolved from the incredibly durable data storage mediums the Bradicor store their brains in. This means that Schlock and his kin are effectively immortal, and gives you an idea of just how long the Bradicor have been around.** Eina-Afa, or "Synthetic Wind," is the mind of a space station with enough open air inside to house planets. After spending a few million years alone, she renamed herself T'kkkuts-Afa ("Broken Wind") and created storms in her otherwise paradisiacal sky in order to create evolutionary pressure for intelligent life to develop. Yes, she's old (and lonely) enough that she was willing to wait for animals to achieve sentience just so she would have someone to talk to.* ''Webcomic/SonicTheComicOnline'' has [[spoiler:Tikal The Echidna]] who was sealed with Chaos, Vichama the God of Death and the reason [[spoiler:Knuckles The Echidna]] is immortal as well as a weapon by the Drakon Empire called [[spoiler:Shadow The Hedgehog]] and the advanced Guardian Robot called the Gizoid.* No matter how far you go back in the Talse Uzer Stories, the Tower from ''Webcomic/TowerOfGod'' was always there. It has been stated that it was conquered and civilized 5000 years ago, though.* Jin of ''Webcomic/WapsiSquare'' seems to qualify. Not only does she predate most of Earth's known civilizations, but she has lived even longer than it seems due to a GroundhogDayLoop. The 1450 years before 2012 have repeated 56 times, and she is the only one that remembers. It is starting to get to her.** The Demons qualify and then some. They travel from mortal host to mortal host, moving to others when individuals die, civilizations die, species die, universes die, and new ones arise. They are literally trillions of years old. They're so static that the ability to change- even to gain a lifespan- is considered a holy grail for many of them.* The characters of ''Webcomic/{{Nebula}}'' are at least four or five billion years old at the time the comic takes place, what with being [[AnthropomorphicPersonification sentient planets]]; for a hint of how big a timescale they're working with, the age gap between them and Sun is around a hundred million years or so, and he's considered to be barely older than them.* In ''Webcomic/TheSanityCircus'', both the Scarecrows and the Instrumen appear like young adults. Posey Morris, a Scarecrow, looks like a sweet young girl. Regardless, when she gets into a fight with Luther the cello, he cheerfully says 'Oh well! Let's not bring up centuries-old grudges.'[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Original]]* Website/ChuckNorrisFacts: When God said "Let there be light", Chuck Norris said "Say please".* Cro-Marmot from ''WebAnimation/HappyTreeFriends'' is over 1,000,000 years old. Justified, since he is frozen in a block of ice.* By the end of ''Literature/FineStructure'', Anne Poole has lived for over 20,000 years. Mitch technically gets that far as well, through tricks like BrainUploading and {{Body Surf}}ing, but Anne takes TheSlowPath and experiences the entire time -- including over a century spent buried alive.* The Abyss is an immortal ''Homo habilis'' from the ''Roleplay/GlobalGuardiansPBEMUniverse''. He's kept most of his memories of the last million and a half years (though he's been alive for 2 million years... his memory of his early days is no longer so clear). He once gave a HannibalLecture in which he described the day he was nearly killed by a terror bird.* On the online speculative evolution project A Scientific Fantasy, the dinosauroids (species normally don't count, but since the whole species is also a civilization, it counts) fired a laser to blow up the asteroid that caused the K-T extinction and had already been around for 10 million years.* Literature/WhateleyUniverse** Aunghadhail is a [[TheFairFolk Sidhe queen]] so old she remembers the Earth before humans populated it. She and her family may have ''created the dinosaurs''.** In the latest Tennyo story, we learn [[spoiler:the Star Stalker is eight billion years old and was constructed by one of the first civilizations in the universe]].* [[http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=243 After Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they sublet an apartment from Frank Lautenberg before finding a place of their own]], according to his Jew Or Not Jew profile.* The Drylon in ''Literature/BeyondTheImpossible'': since they’ve disappeared five billion years ago, everything they’ve built is ''at least'' older than Earth [[spoiler: including the Nexus inside Noriko’s head]]. The gods are also incredibly long-lived: Vesta is a million years old, Hekate is a hundred times older, and Gaea was around at the formation of Earth.* Two of them live in ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}: [[spoiler: Salem, the BigBad, and Professor Ozpin, the BigGood. Professor Ozpin even got cursed by the gods to reincarnate every time he died since he failed in stopping Salem, while Salem appears to just not age,]] meaning the both of them have existed almost since the creation of Remnant.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]* In ''WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball'', Miss Simian has apparently been teaching at Elmore Junior High since the Stone Age, and is at least 2 million years old. Her father's skeleton is on display in a natural history museum.* ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'':** The Avatar Spirit. It's the spirit of the Earth, after all, so it existed even before it started manifesting itself as Avatars. ''The Legend Of Korra'' reveals that [[spoiler:the Avatar Spirit is in fact a spirit of Light and Peace named Raava. Given she is Vaatu's (see below) counterpart, she's almost certainly just as old]].** Tui and La, the Moon and Ocean spirits, [[spoiler:crossed to the mortal realm]] "very near the beginning" according to [[CreepyAwesome Koh]], who is himself an example as he's the only spirit old enough to remember it. The canon comic series has the Gaang meet Koh's mother, the spirit who first gave humans the concept of ''identity''.** [[spoiler:The Lion Turtle.]] It's AllThereInTheManual that he and his species are ''as old as the earth itself,'' and therefore, as old as the Avatar Spirit. Unfortunately, [[spoiler:he's the LastOfHisKind]].* ''WesternAnimation/{{Beetlejuice}}'': In "Ship of Ghouls", the ghost pirate Jean [=LeFoot=] and his crew of the Flying Dutchman have been trapped inside the Bermuda Shorts Triangle for ''two'' eternities.* While Professor Paradox of ''WesternAnimation/Ben10AlienForce'' is a time traveler, he's also ''countless billions''[[note]]He lost count long ago.[[/note]] of years old, independent of time travel. When time travel ''is'' taken into account, Paradox has most likely existed forever, despite originally being an ordinary human.* ''WesternAnimation/CaptainPlanetAndThePlaneteers'': If [[BigBad/WesternAnimation Zarm's]] words from "Summit to Save Earth, Part 2" are to be believed, [[MotherNature Gaia]] is about the Earth's age... or ''older''.-->'''Linka:''' What have you done to Gaia?!\\'''Zarm:''' Gaia is simply starting to show her true age. (''mockingly:'') What is it, Gaia? Five, six ''billion'' years old?** Considering that a century-long sleep is "a little nap" for her, he might have told the truth, though.* The German short film [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU20NMswpps ''Das Rad'' (''The Wheel'')]] focuses on the lives of two anthropomorphic stone heaps. They witness the (exponential) rise of mankind [[spoiler:and its sudden fall]]. In ten minutes.* Played for laughs in ''WesternAnimation/{{Earthworm Jim}}''. Evil the Cat claims he "existed before the dawn of time and will continue to exist past its end!" Jim and Peter escape from him as he tries to explain the logic.* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}''** The Nibblonians were already seventeen years old by the time of the Big Bang, while their nemeses, the Brainspawn, came to existence a few milliseconds after it.-->"In the time it would take to pronounce one letter of my true name, a trillion cosmoses would flare into existence and sink into eternal night."** Bender became this in "Bender's Big Score." The scammer aliens, after brainwashing him, got him to go back in time to steal them every valuable item in history. Keep in mind that the time travel he's using is one-way, Bender is searching for them one at a time, and is perfectly happy waiting it out with previous versions of himself. It's unclear how much time it took for him, but given the hundreds of Benders we see at the end, his minimum age would be ''a million years.'' And given the WhatIf Holiday special showed he could last half a billion years, Bender's life '''has just begun.'''*** Bender already made a step toward becoming this in "Roswell That Ends Well". The Planet Express crew travels back to 1947, and as they return to the 31st century, Bender's head falls out the ship, being buried for a thousand years.** Yivo from "The Beast with a Billion Backs". For a trillion years, shkle was satisfied with shkler life as the lone being of another universe, but when shkle looked across immensity, shkle saw the Big Bang and said, "Whoa. Who's that?".* The ending of ''WesternAnimation/ItsSuchABeautifulDay'' has [[spoiler: the main character, Bill,]] outlive the Universe itself. This could all very well have been a delusion, but it's never made clear.* The ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPandaLegendsOfAwesomeness'' episode "A Stitch In Time" introduced The Shuyong Tree. A sentient tree that existed before time began and will continue to exist after it ends.* ''WesternAnimation/TheLegendOfKorra'': The spirit Vaatu claimed to have lived 10,000 lifetimes before humans appeared. Since each Harmonic Convergence counts as a lifetime and each one is 10,000 years apart, he was at least 100,000,000 years old when humans first showed up.* ''Franchise/MyLittlePony''** Discord from ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' was [[TakenForGranite sealed in stone]] more than a thousand years ago, and offhandedly mentions being around for several "eons". As the AnthropomorphicPersonification of [[OrderVersusChaos chaos and disharmony]], he could be as old as the universe itself.** Princess Celestia and Princess Luna don't give us anything like birthdates, but it was a thousand years ago when Celestia had to seal Luna, who had [[FaceHeelTurn become Nightmare Moon]]. (Luna got better.) We get no numbers outside that, but we know they were the rulers of Equestria ''as well as'' being the ones who raised the sun and moon ''then,'' as opposed to being "only" a thousand years old. We hear the story of the founding of Equestria, and though their direct involvement is not mentioned they ''are'' on the very first flag with their sun and moon symbols. Also, every SealedEvilInACan who has been imprisoned for four-digit spans of years was sealed by them. With season premiere-class threats, Celestia is usually telling the protagonists about what was going on because it was so long ago that history books contain ''nothing'' on it. Every detail of history and magic that was ever written, Twilight knows. Every detail that was ''never'' written, totally unknown or thought of as only legend, the princesses alone can explain because they were there. ** Spike from the ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyG3'' claimed that being over a thousand years old he was still "young", and that his pony friends should wait until he's at least a million years old before they start calling him "old". This was immediately after waking up from a thousand year nap. * Used for laughs in ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' with Mr Burns, who reveals his birthplace to be Pangaea.[[note]]This would make him a minimum of 200 million years old.[[/note]] Of course, this is just another example of the show's NegativeContinuity.* The [[PhysicalGod Force-wielders/Ones]] from ''WesternAnimation/StarWarsTheCloneWars'' have been living in isolation for so long that the newest Jedi distress code they knew had not been used for over two millennia, and there's little doubt they're way older than that. The Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse puts their ages to well over a ''hundred thousand'' years.* General Immortus of ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitans'' was a highly skilled military general - who had been around for nearly every single battle in recorded history. At one point he quotes Sun Tzu, then mentions that he was an excellent pupil. He's described as knowing every tactic used in every battle in every war in history because he was there personally. (His comic counterpart is "merely" pushing a thousand.)* Qilby of ''WesternAnimation/{{Wakfu}}'', being one of the original Eliatropes, has gone through an endless cycle of death and rebirth for thousands of years. But unlike the others, he also retains the memories of his past lives.* In the first season finale of ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice'', [[BigBad Vandal Savage]] begins his MotiveRant with a casual reference to having lived for over fifty thousand years - and in ''all that time'', nothing disturbed him more than the foundation of the Justice League. * ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'':** Strongly implied to be the case for [[BigBad The]] [[OmnicidalManiac Lich]]. While already known to date back to [[WorldWarIII the Mushroom War]] [[AfterTheEnd a thousand years ago]], the events of "Evergreen" heavily imply [[PhlebotinumKilledTheDinosaurs he was the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs]], which would make him at least 65 million years old. "Gold Stars" implies he's either older ''than the physical universe'', or at least old enough to have learned what was there before the universe came to be.--->'''The Lich:''' "Before there was time... before there was ''anything''... there was nothing. And before there was nothing... ''there were '''monsters'''''."** Later we meet Orgalorg, one of the monsters that the Lich spoke of, and who is better known to viewers as [[spoiler:the penguin Gunther]]. He apparently managed to survive the creation of our Universe, then terrorized and destroyed entire planets before the King of Mars ordered [[PhysicalGod Glob]] to defeat Orgalorg. Orgalorg was defeated and landed on Earth, where he has been living as an AmnesiacGod since prehistoric times. (A series of flashbacks he has when he begins to remember his true nature includes a shot of him fending off what seems like a saber tooth tiger, then later participating in Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Roman societies.)* In ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'', the ''youngest'' of the (non-hybrid) Crystal Gems is at least six thousand years old, and the others are old enough to consider that young. They casually mention things that happened centuries ago, and one of the Gems mentioned that she could remember when humans were still hunter-gatherers.* Bill Cipher from ''WesternAnimation/GravityFalls'' claims in "Weirdmageddon" to have been trapped in the Nightmare Realm for ''one trillion'' years. At the very least, it would make him more than seventy times older than ''our universe'', which is about 14 billion years old.* Cosmo and Wanda from '"WesternAnimation/FairlyOddParents'' have been married for nearly 10,000 years and physically seem to be in their 30s. Cosmo's mother is still alive and well and doesn't appear to be past middle age.[[/folder]]

[[folder:Real Life]]* Living things: ** In a way, life itself is a time abyss. The cells we are made of were split off from our parents' cells, and ''their'' cells came from their parents, and so on and so forth, back to the formation of life, 3.8 billion years ago. Gene sequences exist in every one of our cells that have remained unchanged since the earliest common ancestor to all life. The purest example of this is the common amoeba, which splits itself to reproduce rather than dying of old age. It changes over time, and obviously is composed of different individual molecules, but in a very real sense that first amoeba is still alive and wriggling two billion-odd years later. A new branch of SETI, Biological SETI, is currently examining our DNA for traces of messages left for us by aliens, on the assumption that, with its ability to self-replicate and self-repair, DNA is the only substance on which a message could be transcribed that could be preserved for millions, even billions, of years.** The oldest known living thing on Earth is a single, giant patch of [[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120207152545.htm ''Posidonia Oceanic'' seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea]]. Studies show that it is most likely at least 100,000 years old.** Many species of plants and microorganisms have extremely long or unlimited lifespans; possibly the most famous example is the bristlecone pine tree, individual specimens of which are presently alive in spite of having sprouted nearly five millennia ago. One of them was found to be 4,844 years old when cut down in 1964. (John Muir once commented that a ''shorter-lived'' Sequoia tree was "already centuries old when Jesus walked the Earth.") There are also some trees that live in clonal colonies; the stems are continually renewed while the root system endures. One such colony of Quaking Aspens has roots that are at least 80,000 years old.** The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii immortal jellyfish]] is another example, using a kind of reverse aging. Hydras have a similar mechanism.** The oldest known non-clonal organism is a bristlecone pine which was dendrochronologically dated in 2013 to be 5,067 years old. To put that into perspective, this tree was already about 494 years old when construction of the pyramids of Giza began. * The objective of the [[http://www.longnow.org/clock/ Clock of the Long Now]], a clock that when finished is intended to last for 10,000 years keeping (nearly) perfect time.* Many of the stone circles in Britain fit this trope, being almost/over five thousand years old, as does the Great Pyramid of Giza, which was constructed in ~2560 BC and incidentally held the record for the tallest man-made structure until Lincoln Cathedral was built in 1311- 3870 years later.--> [[WebVideo/VSauce The pyramids of Gizah were as old to the ancient romans, as the ancient romans are...to us.]]* If anything human-built counts, some sites (including a few cities surviving to the present day) in the Middle East are leading contenders.** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe Göbekli Tepe]] is a pre-Neolithic religious complex in Turkey that dates from roughly 9600 BCE and was built by people who had not yet developed metal tools, pottery, the wheel, or agriculture. It is believed that the location's use as a religious centre goes even further back; all the way to 11,000 BCE.** The city of Jericho is also a pre-Neolithic settlement first inhabited around 10,000 BCE, and inhabited[[note]]sort of, it was all but abandoned during the latter part of the Bronze Age, including the date when it was supposedly sacked by the Israelites[[/note]] for all 12,000 years. To give an idea, the ice age ended around 10,000 years ago.** Damascus was first settled at least 8000 -- possibly even 11,000 -- years ago during early Neolithic times, and has been in continuous use ever since. It is older than any modern or ancient civilization. Creator/MarkTwain referred to it as "a form of immortality."* A show about the simple disappearance of all humans predicted that the last traces of human existence would be the man-made objects on the moon (lunar landers, US flag, etc.). Unless some outside force or object intervenes, they would remain on the moon forever. And the only human whose name will be left there (well, on the plaque on the Moon, anyway) is UsefulNotes/RichardNixon. There's something ironic there.** It was also predicted that if humans disappeared from Earth today, Mount Rushmore would still be intact millions of years later, waiting to be seen by the next intelligent species to evolve.* Protons. According to one theory, they are ultimately stable, that is, live absolutely forever. According to another, they have a half-life that makes Brahma seem like a mayfly.** Radioactive material, while not lasting forever, can last an ''incredibly'' long time. The two commonly found forms of uranium, uranium-235 and uranium-238, have a half-life of 703.8 million years and 4.468 billion years respectively. By the time a kilogram block of uranium-238 ceases to exist, the universe may as well have ended. And there are isotopes with longer half lives than that; bismuth-209 has a half-life of around 19,000,000,000,000,000,000 years (that's well over a billion times the commonly accepted value for the current age of the Universe) and is the current record holder for radioactive isotope with the longest known half-life. (If protons actually do decay, then all elements are "radioactive", but experiments have set a lower limit of ''at least'' 59,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for the half-life of hydrogen-1).*** Of course, radioactive material by definition doesn't last anywhere near as long as it would were it not radioactive. Consider protons again.*** Even after all the material in the Universe has decayed to its final state, the subatomic particles of which matter was once composed last effectively forever. It's recommended to take a look at this [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future Timeline of the far future]] in [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]]. [[YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm You Cannot Grasp the True Form]] does not even start to define it: "Although listed in years for convenience, the numbers beyond this point are so vast that their digits would remain unchanged regardless of which conventional units they were listed in, be they nanoseconds or star lifespans."*** On the same line, the very first moments of the Universe after the Big Bang fall into this trope (see [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_of_the_Big_Bang The Other Wiki]]). While those times from our perspective look tiny and meaningless, not so much if one notes the proportions between those epochs and compares them to the future ages of the Universe[[note]]For example, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_epoch Electroweak epoch]] lasted from 10^-36 or 10^-32 seconds to 10^-12 seconds after the Big Bang. If we equal the 10^-43 seconds the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_era Planck era]] (the closest we can get to the Big Bang itself with our current knowledge of Physics) lasted to a year, it would have lasted from 10,000,000 or 100,000,000,000 years to ''10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000'' (10^31) years after the Big Bang.[[/note]] * HD 140283 "Methuselah" is a star initially calculated to be older than the universe, literally older than time. It was later recalculated to be 14.4 billion years old, ±0.8 billion years, which is only slightly better. Even if on the sprightly side of that range, it's very old.** Perhaps surpassed by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMSS_J031300.36-670839.3 SM0313]] Note that age calculations for very old stars have a large percentage of uncertainty as they are based on theoretical models of stellar evolution, so it's far more likely they formed ''after'' the Big Bang and not before it.* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time Deep Time]]* The non-fiction history book ''Human Accomplishment'' by Charles Murray starts with a chapter intended to evoke the Time Abyss, by tracing back human society in 400-year chunks.* While 32-bit Unix systems [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem will run into serious trouble]] in the year 2038, users of 64-bit ones will not have to worry about [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#Notable_events_in_Unix_time that issue]] until the year 292,277,026,596[[note]]Assuming there's still a Universe around to use that OS in, that is[[/note]].[[/folder]]